Engineering at the nano scale for health improvement
Think bigger about smaller-scale drug design and delivery.
Published on the 19 September 2024
The average human has nearly 100,000km of blood vessels within them. They form the superhighway of the human body – providing incredible potential for the design of drug delivery systems (DDS) that can use the tissues of the blood vessels to either apply or transport therapies. Nanomedicine further explores the opportunities that might be found within these interactions, by designing the material systems that deliver treatments – and studying how they interact with the body.
It’s the latter in particular that drives the work of UNSW’s Professor Megan Lord, who’s recognised as a leader in the field of biomaterials (including nanomedicines and nanoparticles), particularly engineering cell-biomaterial interactions for applications in drug delivery and tissue repair.
Finding a path for more effective nanomedical treatments
While nanomedicine opens up a whole new world for treating and diagnosing illnesses, only around 2% of today’s nanomedicines get where they’re intended to reach. The rest is cleared by the liver or kidneys before they’ve even had a chance to pass through the blood vessel wall and connect with the targeted tissue.
A key focus of Prof. Lord’s work is studying how nanomedical approaches interact with the blood vessels. “What this enables is that we can start and diagnose and treat a whole range of conditions with more effective delivery”, says Prof. Lord. “My work is fairly agnostic to the material type. I work with a whole lot of different material types and a whole range of therapeutic cargo”.
Designing Drug Delivery Systems (DDS)
The various kinds of DDS being explored through nanomedicine include lipid, polymeric and inorganic nanomaterials and drug conjugates – which can transport therapeutic cargo like insoluble small molecules, nucleic acids, peptides, proteins (including antibodies) or cells. Recently, DDS has found widespread clinical application in the COVID-19 vaccination – and they continue to be explored by biomedical engineers for vaccines, diagnostics, imaging and therapeutics delivery for cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and more.
“Polymeric nanoparticles are a big part of what we do in UNSW Engineering”, says Prof. Lord. “The beauty of polymers is that we can dial in the properties that we want in terms of charge and shape and size quite effectively. Or we might have conjugates – so that we're not actually encapsulating the drug inside the nanoparticle with the polymer or the lipid, but we actually link it on to a synthetic construct”.
Developing these nanoparticles takes an interdisciplinary approach, with Prof. Lord’s team including chemical and biomedical engineers applying their unique skillsets to design and develop these materials together.
Taking a closer look at blood vessel walls
If you were to look at our blood vessels at a nanoscopic level, you would see that the cell itself is covered by strands of sugars. This is called the Glycocalyx – and this sugar coating is a vital part of a healthy cell structure. It’s also one of the key challenges when designing nanomaterials that can successfully reach the cells that need to be treated.
Shifting the focus away from the targeted cell – a cancer cell, for example – and first recognising the interplay between nanoparticles and these sugars is a key focus for Prof. Lord’s research. “When we're designing nanomaterials, they have to get through this forest of sugars to get internalized by cell”, she says. “We need to get it across this blood vessel wall that has a huge sugar coating on it.”
Significant health outcomes at the nano scale
While Prof. Lord recognises that world-changing health innovation through nanomedicine is still a long and ongoing journey, her team at UNSW are continuing to take exciting steps forward. These include collaborations with clinicians at Royal North Shore hospital to explore how material systems can protect blood cells during sepsis – and exploring nucleic acid delivery for cancer in partnership with UNSW’s RNA Institute.
“There are still so many reasons to be excited about the potential of nanomedicine”, says Prof. Lord. “It’s going to take us a while to get there, but we have new approaches emerging by understanding the biology to better design materials”.
“What drives me is the potential to transform healthcare.”
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