The principles of biomimicry and bioinspiration have been used to design and to engineer drug-delivery technologies that reproduce or recapitulate biological materials, for what pertains to not only their structure and chemistry but also, more importantly, their functions. In drug delivery, surface recognition and nanoscale interactions between materials and biological entities are key to the success of the delivery strategy, and the use of biological building blocks such as membrane proteins has been proposed as a way to convey targeting and shielding moieties simultaneously. One can only hope that the recent events and global attention that viruses are capturing in the scientific world will spur a renewed interest in finding ways to adapt viral features and mechanisms of action to the world of NPs. Increased focus in this field would be useful to create virus-like NPs able to circulate in the blood system, overcoming the endothelial barrier, and to deliver their therapeutic payload with high efficiency.
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Article:
Biomimetic Engineering of Nanodelivery Systems: Artificial Viruses in the Making
In an effort to engineer the next generation of nanoscale vectors, scientists have moved from using inorganic components aimed at obtaining inert structures to utilizing biological building blocks that are able to convey additional functionalities to the resulting construct. To cope with the complexity of the body and to evade the multiple layers of defense that tissues and organs have, it is critical to rely on the ability of certain materials to interact with, rather than to eschew, the biology of our body. Every NP system conceived to date faces one common fate: whether injected, inhaled, ingested, or absorbed through our epithelia, all will at some point come into contact with the mixture of fluids and organic compounds that comprise the body. Under such conditions, every material reacts in a unique way according to the conditions they individually face (i.e., the tissue or body region they are in), their composition (i.e., organic or inorganic), and their physical properties (i.e., size, shape, surface charge). Inorganic NPs can function as globular protein mimics because of their similar size, charge, shape, and surface features that can be chemically functionalized to resemble proteins. These similarities can be used in
Among the many attempts, the legendary accomplishments, and the epic failures, we could list thousands of different NPs, differing from one another thanks to the creative endeavors of their designers. Despite their remarkable differences and researchers’ endeavors to make them one of a kind, they all aim to achieve one goal: to deliver in a specific way one particular form of payload, while remaining as unnoticed as possible by the body’s defense mechanisms. For everyone who has made an effort to create their own version of such a silver bullet, it has come to mind that nature in its incredible variety had already invented a few ingenious solutions to this problem. In the world of nano-based drug delivery, one entity dominates as the quintessential example of precision, efficiency, and stealth: the virus. Not by chance, these two worlds share many features that span from the physical laws that govern their assembly and stability to the chemical similarities in their overall composition.
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