PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Adrian Joseph
AU  - Claudia Contini
AU  - Denis Cecchin
AU  - Sophie Nyberg
AU  - Lorena Ruiz-Perez
AU  - Jens Gaitzsch
AU  - Gavin Fullstone
AU  - Xiaohe Tian
AU  - Juzaili Azizi
AU  - Jane Preston
AU  - Giorgio Volpe
AU  - Giuseppe Battaglia
TI  - Chemotactic synthetic vesicles: design and applications in blood brain barrier crossing
AID  - 10.1101/061325
DP  - 2017 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 061325
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/01/13/061325.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/01/13/061325.full
AB  - In recent years, scientists have created artificial microscopic and nanoscopic self-propelling particles, often referred to as nano- or micro-swimmers, capable of mimicking biological locomotion and taxis. This active diffusion enables the engineering of complex operations that so far have not been possible at the micro- and nanoscale. One of the most promising task is the ability to engineer nanocarriers that can autonomously navigate within tissues and organs, accessing nearly every site of the human body guided by endogenous chemical gradients. Here we report a fully synthetic, organic, nanoscopic system that exhibits attractive chemotaxis driven by enzymatic conversion of glucose. We achieve this by encapsulating glucose oxidase — alone or in combination with catalase — into nanoscopic and biocompatible asymmetric polymer vesicles (known as polymersomes). We show that these vesicles self-propel in response to an external gradient of glucose by inducing a slip velocity on their surface, which makes them move in an extremely sensitive way towards higher concentration regions. We finally demonstrate that the chemotactic behaviour of these nanoswimmers enables a four-fold increase in penetration to the brain compared to non-chemotactic systems.