RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Chemotactic synthetic vesicles: design and applications in blood brain barrier crossing
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 061325
DO 10.1101/061325
A1 Joseph, Adrian
A1 Contini, Claudia
A1 Cecchin, Denis
A1 Nyberg, Sophie
A1 Ruiz-Perez, Lorena
A1 Gaitzsch, Jens
A1 Fullstone, Gavin
A1 Tian, Xiaohe
A1 Azizi, Juzaili
A1 Preston, Jane
A1 Volpe, Giorgio
A1 Battaglia, Giuseppe
YR 2017
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/01/13/061325.abstract
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.