| Oct 18, 2022 |
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(Nanowerk News) Scientists at RMIT University say their new research advances the potential of nanomedicine to cure conditions that are currently incurable, such as dementia and motor neurone disease.
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Their work explores how nanoparticles would interact with cells in humans and provides fundamental knowledge to help improve nanomedicine and develop the next generation of personalised biomedical technologies.
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Nanoparticles open the door to technologies that could improve treatments and disease diagnosis for patients, according to the scientists.
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One of the lead researchers, Dr Aaron Elbourne, said nanoparticle technologies could ultimately improve drug delivery, cancer treatments, disease diagnostics and antimicrobials.
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“Nanoparticles have been investigated as advanced nanomedicines, but they often miss the mark or fail to deliver their treatment to a specific location within the body,” said Elbourne, from the School of Science.
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“The main challenge is to control how nanoparticles engage with cells to accurately deliver the medicine. This has been poorly understood until now, but our latest work offers a clearer picture of what is happening at that nano level.”
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| A computer-generated image of a single gold nanoparticle rolling along a cell membrane. (Image: RMIT University)
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Helping to design better nanomedicines and diagnostic nanoparticles
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Most nanoparticle technologies need to pass through a cell’s outer membrane to fulfill their function, Elbourne said.
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“This membrane serves as an important protective barrier that isolates the internal cell environment from the surroundings, but it also poses a challenge for the delivery of nanoparticles.”
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Elbourne said if scientists could overcome this challenge, it would potentially open a new era of medicine.
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The latest study, led by RMIT in collaboration with the University of Durham and published in the ACS Nano journal (“Behavior of Citrate-Capped Ultrasmall Gold Nanoparticles on a Supported Lipid Bilayer Interface at Atomic Resolution”), tackles this problem by providing scientists a pathway to design more effective nanomedicines and diagnostic nanoparticles.
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How they conducted the research
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Using atomic force microscopy along with computer simulations of molecular activity, the team discovered the precise mechanisms by which gold nanoparticles – a tiny fraction of the width of a human hair – interact with artificial cell membranes.
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Fellow RMIT lead researcher, Dr Andrew Christofferson, said their work was unique.
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“What makes this work unique is that we combine experiments and modelling to show a level of detail not seen before, and this will serve as a platform for future studies of nanoparticles and biological materials.”
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| A computer simulation of molecular activity reveals how a therapeutic gold nanoparticle interacts with a synthetic cell membrane. (Image: RMIT University)
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The potential to treat currently untreatable brain diseases
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The team says one of the main barriers to finding a cure for diseases such as dementia and motor neurone disease is the current inability to deliver treatments that can cross the blood-brain barrier, a membrane that blocks foreign entities reaching the brain.
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First author and PhD researcher, Rashad Kariuki, was excited to work with nanoparticles that would be small enough to pass through this membrane.
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“We currently have limited treatments that can pass through the blood-brain barrier because many are just too big or don’t interact favourably with this particular membrane,” he said.
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“If we could use nanoparticles to treat brain diseases non-invasively, that would be a gamechanger.”
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More work needs to be done before nanoparticles reach their full potential to help treat diseases but new wound treatments using this technology are in development, Elbourne said.
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“We have collaborators at the University of South Australia that we’re working with on treatments for chronic and acute wounds,” Elbourne said.
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“Ultimately, our work could positively impact a wide range of treatments, meaning better outcomes for patients and health systems.”
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