Recently, the team led by Professor Wang Guixue of the School of Bioengineering published a paper titled “Biomimetic Nanotherapies: Red Blood Cell d Core–Shell Structured Nanocomplexes for Atherosclerosis Management” in Advanced Science (latest influence factor 12.441), an international authoritative journal, on line (DOI: 10.1002/advs.201900172). The first author of the paper is Wang Yi, a doctoral candidate of 2015. Professor Wang Guixue is the corresponding author. Associate Professor Wu Wei, a young teacher, is the corresponding co-author. Chongqing University is the first completing organization and corresponding author organization of the paper.
Fig.1 Sketch map of the preparation of bionics nano-drug RBC/RAP@PLGA and treatment of AS
Atherosclerosis (AS) is a kind of typical chronic inflammatory vascular disease and forms the common pathological basis of ischemic cardiovascular diseases, such as cerebrovascular disease, coronary heart disease and peripheral arterial disease, seriously endangering people’s health. At present, oral lipid-lowering drugs or anti-inflammatory drugs are used to inhibit generation and development of AS. However, traditional oral drugs have problems such as low utilization rate, delayed effect and obvious toxic and side effect. Nano-drug delivery system is able to solubilize drug, increase the half-life period of drug, improve in-body distribution of drugs and reduce their toxic and side effect. It is of significant application value and broad market prospective in clinical AS diagnosis and treatment. However, traditional nano-drug delivery system can hardly gain interactive recognition as normal living organism and will be inevitably eliminated by the body as a “non-self” foreign matter, making it difficult to deliver the drug to the target lesion by targeting delivery.
To tackle the above problems, the team led by Wang Guixue used the bionics design policy that coordinates the “autologous” and “manual” drug delivery system in an innovative way to apply RBC onto the nano-drug RAP@PLGA as a coating, thus creating the bionics nano-drug RBC/RAP@PLGA that integrates functions including drug sustained release, long-term blood circulation and effective targeting AS drug delivery. It is used for treatment of AS for the first time. Research results indicated that: the bionics nano drug can be used to efficiently and safely treat AS in mouse models. This research has resulted in a new design thought for nano-drug treatment of AS, and contributed to development of individualized and targeted AS treatment. It is therefore of substantial scientific research significance and potential clinical application value.
This research has been supported by the National Key R&D Program of the “13th Five-year Plan” (2016YFC1102305), National Natural Science Foundation (51603023, 11572064), the funds for scientific research in colleges and universities allocated by the central government and the earmarked funds for cutting-edge technological research and basic science of Chongqing. Dr. Sean McGinty from the University of Glasgow and Dr. Giuseppe Pontrelli from IMAG have participated in the simulated research of drug release and compilation of the paper. Dr. Jun Ren and Dr. Qiwei Wang from Harvard Medical School have participated in result analysis and paper compilation.
(Click the following link to view the paper:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/advs.201900172)
