Paper: Method for antibody conjugation to nanoparticles
SuperCol ESR Pierre Cybulski of KU Leuven co-authored a paper in the journal Pharmaceutics that describes chemical methods to functionalize particles with biomolecules (antibodies), and studies the efficiency with which the particles “find” cancer cells.
Abstract:
The application of antibodies in nanomedicine is now standard practice in research since it represents an innovative approach to deliver chemotherapy agents selectively to tumors. The variety of targets or markers that are overexpressed in different types of cancers results in a high demand for antibody conjugated-nanoparticles, which are versatile and easily customizable. Considering up-scaling, the synthesis of antibody-conjugated nanoparticles should be simple and highly reproducible. Here, we developed a facile coating strategy to produce antibody-conjugated nanoparticles using ‘click chemistry’ and further evaluated their selectivity towards cancer cells expressing different markers. Our approach was consistently repeated for the conjugation of antibodies against CD44 and EGFR, which are prominent cancer cell markers. The functionalized particles presented excellent cell specificity towards CD44 and EGFR overexpressing cells, respectively. Our results indicated that the developed coating method is reproducible, versatile, and non-toxic, and can be used for particle functionalization with different antibodies. This grafting strategy can be applied to a wide range of nanoparticles and will contribute to the development of future targeted drug delivery systems.
Paper details:
Indra Van Zundert, Maria Bravo, Olivier Deschaume, Pierre Cybulski, Carmen Bartic, Johan Hofkens, Hiroshi Uji-i, Beatrice Fortuni and Susana Rocha:
Versatile and robust method for antibody conjugation to nanoparticles with high targeting efficiency
Pharmaceutics 2021, 13, 2153. DOI: 10.3390/pharmaceutics13122153