| 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. | |
| 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. | |
| Nanoparticles open the door to technologies that could improve treatments and disease diagnosis for patients, according to the scientists. | |
| One of the lead researchers, Dr Aaron Elbourne, said nanoparticle technologies could ultimately improve drug delivery, cancer treatments, disease diagnostics and antimicrobials. | |
| “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. | |
| “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.” |
Helping to design better nanomedicines and diagnostic nanoparticles |
|
| Most nanoparticle technologies need to pass through a cell’s outer membrane to fulfill their function, Elbourne said. | |
| “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.” | |
| Elbourne said if scientists could overcome this challenge, it would potentially open a new era of medicine. | |
| 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. | |
How they conducted the research |
|
| 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. | |
| Fellow RMIT lead researcher, Dr Andrew Christofferson, said their work was unique. | |
| “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.” |
The potential to treat currently untreatable brain diseases |
|
| 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. | |
| First author and PhD researcher, Rashad Kariuki, was excited to work with nanoparticles that would be small enough to pass through this membrane. | |
| “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. | |
| “If we could use nanoparticles to treat brain diseases non-invasively, that would be a gamechanger.” | |
| 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. | |
| “We have collaborators at the University of South Australia that we’re working with on treatments for chronic and acute wounds,” Elbourne said. | |
| “Ultimately, our work could positively impact a wide range of treatments, meaning better outcomes for patients and health systems.” |
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