Vaterite CaCO ₃ crystals as fully decomposable intracellular drug delivery carriers Mariam John Mammen, Rian Salisbury, Mark Christian, Dmitry Volodkin School of Science and Technology, Nottingham Trent University, UK Delivery of bioactive molecules (bioactives) inside cells is one of the paramount goals in drug delivery and tissue engineering. However, modern delivery vehicles (e.g. liposomes, lipoplexes, polymer complexes) have limitations due to their poorly regulated life span, biodegradation requirements, affecting bioactivity, etc. The ideal delivery carrier should be fully biodegradable and able to host significant and variable amounts of a bioactive, protect them against undesired enzymatic cleavage and inhibition as well as release the bioactive content in the required time and space. This interdisciplinary work aims to develop a new intracellular delivery mechanism based on pure CaCO 3 vaterite micro-sized crystals. For this, the powerful technology of co-synthesis into vaterite crystals at fully biofriendly conditions was employed to encapsulate, protect and deliver dextranes as model bioactives. Preliminary experiments demonstrated effective uptake and full decomposition of the crystals in lysosomes without affecting viability of adipocytes as model cells. Cellular uptake depends on concentration of the crystals and the kinetics of crystal dissolution inside cells may vary from hours and up to days. We assessed the effect of crystal charge and size onto uptake and intracellular dissolution rate. Calcium ion flux in adipocytes was also examined. These findings will help to enhance adipocyte activity which improves metabolic health and provides new avenues for treatment of many metabolic disorders such as diabetes, adiposity, and fatty liver and cardiovascular disease.
P12
© The Author(s), 2023
Made with FlippingBook Learn more on our blog