[nanoPost] Nanocells

Company UK

Nanocells are being used to create a wide variety of products with novel characteristics, functions and applications that have massive potential as therapeutics and diagnostics, bringing endless possibilities to life.

Technology > Overview

The biocompatible nanocells possess a number of unique properties that make them ideal for therapeutics, diagnostics and other enabling applications.

- Nanocells are water soluble.
- Nanocells can present multiple ligands, allowing for multivalent drug or multi-drug delivery on a single particle.
- Their size enables drug delivery via different routes of administration, such as parental or intranasal. Their stability to enzymatic digestion may also permit oral therapy.
- Their outer shell (or corona) can be designed to be "stealth" (invisible to the host immune system); and are thus expected to present no immunological liability.
- Nanocells self-assemble in a single step chemical process.

- Manufacture is therefore simple, safe, scaleable and low cost.
- Owing to these properties, nanocell vaccines have been made incorporating all components required to simultaneously stimulate the multiple arms of the immune system as well as the antigenic structures.

Nanocells can be superparamagnetic, enabling them to be used as non-invasive imaging agents (MRI). They can also be magnetic or metallic, enabling them to be used as antenna for inducing cell suicide by localised heating (apoptosis caused by heating of an intracellular or cell-surface bound nanoparticle with an external electromagnetic field), a procedure being investigated as thermotherapy for both bacterial infections and cancers.

Potential applications include:

- Developing magnetic or metallic nanoparticles for localised heating: nanocells can be targeted at disease or microbial cells and heated by applying a low strength electromagnetic field to induce apoptosis of targeted disease (e.g. cancer) cells or bacteria.
- Nanocells can cross the blood-brain barrier to deliver drugs for the treatment of Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and other CNS diseases.
- Magnetic imaging: the gold nanocell core can be supplemented with iron atoms to enhance contrast.
- Nanocells as synthetic vaccines.
- Delivery of siRNA and DNA based therapeutics.
- Carriers of antibiotics (lower and more effective doses).
- Nanocells as targeted delivery vehicles for small-molecule drugs.