Drug Delivery

Drug Delivery

1. Design and development of new delivery vehicles:

Our laboratory is working on RBCs membrane derived vesicles for drug delivery applications. The idea is to engineer host's cell membrane to load therapeutics and develop it as personalized medicine. Natural vesicles have been found to exhibit excellent stability and long circulation time in-vivo due to their superior physico-chemical characteristics as compared to synthetic nanoparticles.

Further, we focus on an emerging class of internally nanostructured lipid particles, called cubosomes, that offer advantages relative to liposomes. We are working on routes to provide a versatile multifunctional delivery vehicles by coating nanostructures with a single molecular layer of poly-ε-lysine. This method not only provides chemical handles for conjugation of targeting ligands but, remarkably, allows us to decrease the burst release rate of encapsulated molecules.

2. Gaining insight into structure-bioactivity relation:

The goal is to create nanostructures based on optimization of molecular and nanoscale interactions of the material with cells. We rely on studies elucidating which properties of a material crucially affect bioactivity at the molecular level. Structure-bioactivity relationships can be established by systematically synthesizing nanostructures with varied structural motifs and studying the effect of such variations on the mechanisms of their cellular internalization, their biological function, elimination process, and toxicity. We are interested in carrying out studies, which shed insight into the cellular fate of delivery vehicles. We believe these studies will provide us with design rules for developing nanomaterials with enhanced bioactivities.

Some of the recent work pulished