nano-fish net trapping drug molecules

Molecules found in nature, such as DNA and peptides, can rapidly self-assemble and organize into diverse structures. Mimicking this process using human-made polymer systems, however, has remained limited. Previously developed processes for self-assembling drug delivery systems are time consuming, labor intensive and difficult to scale. The processes also tend to be woefully inefficient, culminating in a small fraction of the drug actually making it inside the delivery system.

"Clinical application of self-assembled nanoparticles has been limited by difficulties with scalability and with loading large or multiple therapeutics, especially proteins," Scott said. "We present a highly scalable mechanism that can stably load nearly any therapeutic molecule with high efficiency."

Scott's team found success by using a polypropylene sulfone (PPSU) homopolymer, which is highly soluble in dimethylsulfoxide (DMSO) solution, but forms electrostatic and hydrophilic aggregates in water. The aggregates are amphiphilic, which causes them to assemble into networks and eventually collapse into gels.

"Adding more water induces the network to collapse, leading to the formation of nanogels," "The manner in which water is added affects the PPSU chain formation, which changes the nanogels' size and structure."

Atomistic simulations confirmed that the nanostructures were stabilized by weak sulfone-sulfone bonding. 

 

 

self assembled 된 polymer 사이에 protein, 약물등을 담을 수 있다. 물을 넣어주면 nanogel이 된다고 한다.

 

reference

Fanfan Du et al, Homopolymer self-assembly of poly(propylene sulfone) hydrogels via dynamic noncovalent sulfone–sulfone bonding, Nature Communications (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-18657-5