Immune system plays important role in nanoparticle drug delivery, new research says

摘要

A recent collaboration, published in ACS Nano, between researchers at the University of Brighton and the Technical University of Denmark has shown that the body's immune system plays a key role in nanoparticle drug delivery. Nanoscale technology has been demonstrated in recent years to offer great opportunity in terms of the targeted delivery of therapeutics for the treatment of diseases such as cancer, as lead researcher Moein Moghimi explains "Researchers today are able to encapsulate medicine in nanoparticles the size of viruses. The nanoparticles are effective for drug delivery - the delivery of the medicine to the body - because they can very precisely find diseased cells and carry the medicine to them. This means that you can suffice with less dosage and thereby fewer side effects". The study focused on nanoparticle surface coating and showed that the nature of this coating has the potential to greatly affect the body's immune response to the administered particles. These findings are important from a particle-design, drug-delivery and clinical perspective, and are discussed in an opinion piece in the high-profile Nature Nanotechnology.