Biopolymer-Based Nanoparticles for Drug/Gene Delivery and Tissue Engineering

Abstract

There has been a great interest in application of nanoparticles as biomaterials for delivery of therapeutic molecules such as drugs and genes, and for tissue engineering. In particular, biopolymers are suitable materials as nanoparticles for clinical application due to their versatile traits, including biocompatibility, biodegradability and low immunogenicity. Biopolymers are polymers that are produced from living organisms, which are classified in three groups: polysaccharides, proteins and nucleic acids. It is important to control particle size, charge, morphology of surface and release rate of loaded molecules to use biopolymer-based nanoparticles as drug/gene delivery carriers. To obtain a nano-carrier for therapeutic purposes, a variety of materials and preparation process has been attempted. This review focuses on fabrication of biocompatible nanoparticles consisting of biopolymers such as protein (silk, collagen, gelatin, β-casein, zein and albumin), protein-mimicked polypeptides and polysaccharides (chitosan, alginate, pullulan, starch and heparin). The effects of the nature of the materials and the fabrication process on the characteristics of the nanoparticles are described. In addition, their application as delivery carriers of therapeutic drugs and genes and biomaterials for tissue engineering are also reviewed.

Supramolecular nanoscale assemblies for cancer diagnosis and therapy

“…Polymeric NPs such as micelles, nanospheres, nanocapsules and polymersomes are the most frequently used in DDS. Polymeric NPs possess the following advantages for drug delivery [8,215,220,221]:  increased drug solubility  better drug biodistribution;  increased drug stability and circulation half-life time [9,222,223];  enhanced drug accumulation in tumours due to the EPR effect [6,224,225];  drug targeting to specific locations [226].…”

“…These polymers can be formulated into novel nanocarriers encapsulating hydrophilic or hydrophobic anticancer drugs [4,8,[215][216][217]. Natural and synthetic polymers have already been used for drug delivery in preclinical and clinical studies [218].…”

Investigating the antibacterial potential of agarose nanoparticles synthesized by nanoprecipitation technology

“…In this regard, biopolymers have become the preferred choice as polymer matrices due to their easy availability, inexpensive and environmental friendly nature 3,4 . Moreover, the presence of oxygen rich functionalities (eg.…”

Encapsulation of a proteasome inhibitor with gold-polysaccharide nanocarriers

“…Actually, AuNPs have been investigated for targeting drugs directly in situ, reducing several effects in the body, minimizing the multi-drug resistance (MRD) (Parveen et al 2012). Also, AuNPs were chosen to accumulate in tumors through the EPR effect (Nitta and Numata 2013). The presented investigation is focused on application of tumor targetting by a proteasome inhibitor, the bortezomib (BTZ), loaded in combination with pegylated gold nanoparticles (PEGAuNPs) into chitosangum arabic nanoparticles (Ch-GA NPs) to enhance anticancer drug activity and toxicity in cancer cells, protecting normal cells from the drug.…”

“…These acomplishments lead to improve drug delivery and to avoid undesirable systemic side-effects in normal surronding tissues Choi et al 2012). Chitosan (Ch) is a cationic polyssacharide from the patial alkaline deacetylation of chitin (Ruíz-Ramos et al 2006;Nitta and Numata 2013;Nam et al 2009). It is a biodegradable and non-toxic polyssacharide that increases cell membrane permeability, used in biomedical applications (Liu et al 2012;Goodarzi et al 2013;Moschakis et al 2010).…”