GW4 Nanoevade: Smart Design of Nanoparticle-Drugs to Evade the Immune Response
University of Bath: Karen Edler
University of Bristol: Ash Toye
Cardiff University: Mark Young, Riccardo Bonsignore, Andreia De Almeida
University of Exeter: Charlie Jeynes (PI), David Richards
Background
Drugs are an essential part of both tackling numerous medical conditions and maintaining a healthy society. However, traditional drugs often have limitations, such as toxic side effects and poor stability within the body. Importantly, recently developed, extremely small drug carriers (so called ‘nanoparticle-drugs’) have the potential to avoid these limitations and so revolutionise drug delivery.
While many nano-drugs show promise at the early stages of development, many more fail at the clinical testing stage (i.e. in patients), largely due to problems associated with complex immune responses which sequester the nano-drugs in organs like the kidney, spleen or liver before they reach the target tissue.
Project summary
This GW4 initiator grant brought together experts from different disciplines, ranging from nanoparticle chemistry & toxicity to mathematical modelling & immune system biology to address this complex problem. This unique grouping of different disciplines will provide step-changing insight into nanoparticle-drug design & delivery, and will offer revolutionary new avenues for future projects to pursue. The community continue to collaborate, have submitted several grant applications and have developed an animation to explain the concept of nanomedicine.
This proposal directly applies to two GW4 grand challenge areas: “Health, demographic and wellbeing” and “Advanced materials”.
