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A new study explores a biological approach to directing nanocarriers loaded with protein "game changers" to specific cells. The groundbreaking method may be useful in treating myriad malignancies, inflammatory diseases and rare genetic disorders.
Lipid nanoparticles (LNP) have been used to deliver modified messenger RNA to treat inflammatory bowel diseases and other diseases.
Teacher. Dan Peer, Molecular Cell Biology at TAU's Faculty of Life Sciences, led the research for the new study.
Nature Communications – Cell-specific delivery of modified mRNA expressing therapeutic proteins to leukocytes
Over the past few years, lipid carriers encapsulating messenger RNAs (mRNAs) have been shown to be extremely useful in altering the protein expression for a host of diseases. Goal directing this information to specific areas has a major challenge.
"In our new research, we are using mRNA-funded nanovehicles carrying a set of genetic instructions via a biological platform called ASSET – to target the genetic instructions of an anti-inflammatory protein in immune cells," says Prof. Peer. "We have been able to demonstrate that selective anti-inflammatory protein in the target cells in reduced symptoms and disease severity in colitis.
"This research is revolutionary. It can be said that it could encode any protein lacking cells, with direct applications for genetic, inflammatory and autoimmune diseases – not to mention cancer, in which certain genes overexpress themselves. "
ASSET (Anchored Secondary scFv Enabling Targeting) uses a biological approach to direct nanocarriers in specific cells to promote gene manipulation.
"This study opens new avenues in cell-specific delivery of mRNA molecules and ultimately provides specific anti-inflammatory (interleukin 10) mRNAs as a novel therapeutic modality for inflammatory bowel diseases," says Ms. Veiga.
"Targeted mRNA-based protein production has both therapeutic and research applications," she concluded. "Going forward, we are interested in using a particular approach for the investigation of novel therapeutics treating inflammation disorders, cancer and rare genetic diseases."
Abstract – Cell-specific delivery of modified mRNA expressing therapeutic proteins to leukocytes
Therapeutic alteration of gene expression in vivo can be achieved by delivering nucleic acids (e.g., mRNA, siRNA) using nanoparticles. Recent advances in modified messenger RNA (mmRNA) synthesis facilitated the development of lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) as a promising tool for in vivo protein expression. Although it has been made with mmRNA-LNPs based protein expression in hepatocytes, this specificity is still a major challenge. Moreover, selective protein expression is essential for an improved therapeutic effect, due to the heterogeneous nature of diseases. Here we present a precision protein expression in Ly6c + inflammatory leukocyte in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) induced mice. We demonstrate a therapeutic effect in an IBD model by targeted expression of interleukin in Ly6c + inflammatory leukocytes. A selective mmRNA expression strategy has tremendous therapeutic potential in IBD and can become a novel therapeutic modality in many other diseases.
To overcome the hurdles of selective, targeted delivery of lipid-based technologies, we recently developed a modular targeting platform named ASSET (Anchored Secondary scFv Enabling Targeting). ASSET coats the LNPs with monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) and enables flexible switching between different targeting mAbs. ASSET utilizes a biological approach and facilitates the construction of a theoretically unrestricted repertoire of carriers and delivers RNA molecules efficiently to various leukocytes subsets in vivo.
Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is characterized by a complex and dysregulated immune response. The onset of IBD is considered a combination of genetic alterations and environmental factors. Therefore, an effective treatment for IBD requires a temporal and spatial immunosuppressive effect
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