Engineers design nanoparticles that deliver high doses of antibiotics directly to bacteria.
Story content courtesy of MIT News Office, US
Over the past several decades, scientists have faced challenges in developing new antibiotics even as bacteria have become increasingly resistant to existing drugs. One strategy that might combat such resistance would be to overwhelm bacterial defenses by using highly targeted nanoparticles to deliver large doses of existing antibiotics.
In a step toward that goal, researchers at MIT and Brigham and Women’s Hospital have developed a nanoparticle designed to evade the immune system and home in on infection sites, then unleash a focused antibiotic attack.
The team created the new nanoparticles from a polymer capped with polyethylene glycol (PEG). Once the nanoparticles bind to bacteria, they begin releasing their drug payload, which is embedded in the core of the particle. In this study, the researchers designed the particles to deliver vancomycin, used to treat drug-resistant infections, but the particles could be modified to deliver other antibiotics or combinations of drugs.
This approach would mitigate the side effects of some antibiotics and protect the beneficial bacteria that normally live inside our bodies, says Aleks Radovic-Moreno, an MIT graduate student and lead author of a paper describing the particles.
Institute Professor Robert Langer of MIT and Omid Farokzhad, director of the Laboratory of Nanomedicine and Biomaterials at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, are senior authors of the paper. Timothy Lu, an assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science, and MIT undergraduates Vlad Puscasu and Christopher Yoon also contributed to the research.
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