Making vessels leaky on demand could aid drug delivery

Rice bioengineer Gang Bao and collaborators at Emory

a

University and the Georgia Institute of Technology reported using magnets to help iron-oxide nanoparticles invade endothelial cells both in the lab and in vivo. Then they use the same magnets to make vessels temporarily "leaky."

This permeability would allow large-molecule drugs to reach target tissues, Bao said. Strong magnets may be able to lead nanoparticle-infused stem cells or drug-laden nanoparticles themselves to targeted areas, even in deep tissues like organs that current therapies cannot reach, he said.

The study appears today in Nature Communications.

"For many diseases, systemic delivery through the blood stream is the only way to deliver molecules to the site," Bao said. "Small molecules can penetrate the blood vessel and get into the diseased cells, but large molecules like proteins or drug-loaded nanoparticles cannot pass the endothelium effectively unless it is leaky."

Blood vessels in cancerous tumors typically have holes in the endothelial barrier, but they don't close on demand like Bao and his team hope to make them do.

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-06-vessels-leaky-demand-aid-drug.html#jCp