CLIMB · Development of a Cavity Supported Lipid Membranes Biomimetic drug permeability models (CLIMB)

Development of a Cavity Supported Lipid Membranes Biomimetic drug permeability models (CLIMB)

Majority of therapeutic molecules must overcome membrane barrier before reaching their site of action. However, optimal delivery of drugs has always remained elusive in the pharmaceutical industry. This cannot be more true for diseases such as neurological disorders, cancers, and viral infections, which have affected millions globally, causing billion-dollar worth of productivity loss worldwide. Yet, delivery issues remain largely unresolved. In principle, one could increase the chance of Identifying a drug with both good delivery efficiency and the desired therapeutic efficacy by screening hundreds of thousands or more drug candidates. Unfortunately, such an endeavor is formidably uneconomical. The current project is to address this challenge – to devise a platform for the accurate prediction of drug’s membrane permeability in a high-throughput manner. To meet this vision, the main objective of the current project is to provide a proof-of-principle demonstration of how prudently designed nano-photonic structures can be made to mimic an actual cell in terms of drug uptake. While cell-based assay is conventionally used, it is laborious and expensive as biological cells needed to be cultured and kept in a sterilized condition. To this end, this project seeks to develop a novel platform bearing photonics-based ‘artificial cells’, for the study of drug plasma membrane interactions. The cells provide cell membrane analogues across which molecule binding, entry and diffusion dynamics can be monitored using multiple distinct analytical modalities including Electrochemsitry, Raman and Fluorescence Spectroscopy. The modalities can be combined and the methods selected depend on the characteristics of the drug. In conclusion, it is showed that the ‘artificial cells’ can display uptake behavior characteristic of real biological cells for representative libraries of drugs from different drug categories. More importantly, using a multi-modal approach, the current method is also able to reveal the underlying mechanism of drug-transport across the membrane, that was normally obscured in traditional cell-based assays. For more details on this project and related publications, please visit https://sites.google.com/dcu.ie/keyes-research-group/research.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз