Towards cell-based therapeutics: A bio-inspired autonomous drug delivery system

摘要

Traditional drug delivery systems are often inefficient and imprecise as they mainly rely on diffusion processes. For example, the blood circulation system is often used to transport and deliver drugs throughout the body; due to the randomness involved in molecular diffusion, this approach can cause inefficient and imprecise delivery of drugs. To address this problem, we propose an autonomous and adaptive bacteria-based drug delivery system that integrates bacterial chemotaxis and quorum sensing in order to deliver drugs efficiently and precisely at various location in the human body. More specifically, we design a synthetic AND gate that enables bacteria to detect molecules produced by tumors and release the appropriate drugs in a coordinated manner; the system can also dynamically adjust the amount of drugs released based on tumor size and activity level. Our experimental results show that the proposed system can be effectively used for cell-based therapeutics while preventing drug overuse and multi-drug resistance.