Trying to sneak a targeted drug into a kidney and then keeping it from getting eliminated from our body is quite difficult. Kidneys act as filtering agents in our body. They are prompt in getting rid of particles that they feel do not belong in our body.
Now, researchers at the University of Southern California’s Viterbi School of Engineering, in collaboration with colleagues from the Keck School of Medicine at USC, have engineered peptide nanoparticles that can outsmart our biological systems and head straight towards our kidneys. This new development can prove to be more than useful for treating chronic kidney disease.
Up until now, there hasn’t been any concrete solutions for treating advanced kidney disease beyond dialysis and kidney transplant. The problem with these two is that they are more extremely expensive and taxing. Additional medication prescribed along with both of these can often negatively impact organs in the body.
The research team created a particle that could target the kidney directly over the course of several months. The nanoparticle is a micelle, and it is 10-20 times smaller than the traditional nanoparticle. It is synthesized from a peptide chain that is formulated from lysine and some glutamic acids.
The extra small size of the nanoparticle enables passage into the kidneys without having to worry about the initial barrier of kidney filtration while the peptide lets the nanoparticle to stay in the kidneys- which can help it unload a drug at the site of the disease without getting itself removed by urine.
For the study, researchers injected mice with fluorescent-labeled nanoparticles and found that these particles were more abundant in the kidneys than other parts of the body. These particles, therefore, had the potential to carry drugs more selectively. The fact they are biocompatible and biodegradable and can be carried out of the body in less than a week without damaging any organs is an added plus.
The study, titled “Design and in vivo characterization of kidney-targeting multimodal micelles for renal drug delivery,” was carried out by Eun Ji Chung, Jonathan Wang, Christopher Poon, Deborah Chin, Sarah Milkowski, Vivian Lu from the Viterbi School of Engineering; and Kenneth R. Hallows of the Keck School of Medicine at USC, and was featured recently in the journal Nano Research.