Administration of drugs using small nanocarriers enables effective delivery and targeting of diseased tissues and organs. Therapeutic efficacy may be enhanced by triggering drug release in the desired organ in a controlled manner using a non invasive external stimulus. Aim of the project is to define how to obtain a controlled release from biocompatible carriers as liposomes loading magnetic nanoparticles in their lipid bilayer. The general aim of the project is to provide a proof-of-concept of the remotely control of the magnetoliposomes, by means of low level magnetic fields. Such objective will be pursued combining three common steps: the optimization of the exposure setup; the synthesis of the magnetoliposome and the exposure of the suitable final solution; the modeling of the interaction mechanism between the field and the liposome membrane bilayer containing nanoparticles.
The proposed research represents a highly innovative contribution with huge potentialities towards new methods of delivery of biochemical molecules, being them pharmaceutical drugs, rather than genes or hormones etc.
With respect to hydrophilic nanoparticles embedded in the aqueous core of the liposomes, the inclusion of nanoparticles in the bilayer represents an improvement of the nanosystem, since in this latter case once obtained the release, the risk that nanoparticles will flow outside their vesicle is limited and nanoparticles will be eliminated from the human body embedded within the liposomes rather than circulating in the body.
Once demonstrated that PEMFs fields can trigger a response from the membrane bilayer of liposomial vesicles, releasing their content outside it, one can think to the possibility to translate such laboratory experimental activity to the clinics considering that both approaches may have advantages and at the same time limitations. The drug delivery application mediated by the magnetic field is able to reach deep organs inside the human body, but it has to deal intrinsically with the toxicity dose of nanoparticles;
An even more challenging issue in the next future will be the high-specificity targeted delivery of anti-neoplastic drugs based on an improved physical concept. It exploits the ability of the discovered body-temperature magneto-electric nanoparticles (MENs) to function as nano-converters of remotely supplied magnetic field energy into the MENs' intrinsic electric field energy. As a result, MENs introduced in a biological microenvironment act as localized magnetic-to-electric-field nano-converters that allow remote control and generation of the electric signals that underlie the intrinsic molecular interactions [R Guduru et al., "Magneto-electric Nanoparticles to Enable Field-controlled High-Specificity Drug Delivery to Eradicate Ovarian Cancer Cells", SCIENTIFIC REPORTS, 3: 2953, (2013) 1-8, doi: 10.1038/srep02953]. In this way we put together the advantages of both magnetic (non invasive) and electric (highly focalized) stimulation