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An intelligent liposome that may deliver drug molecules in a well controlled fashion

Dumitru Popescu¹ and Alin Gabriel Popescu²

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1. Institute of Mathematical Statistics and Applied Mathematics, Mathematical Modelling in Life Sciences, Bucharest, Romania
2. Polytechnic University, Faculty of Automatic Control and Computer Science

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Manuscript

Date:

Received 11 October 2007 08:34 UTC; Posted 12 October 2007

Subjects:

Biotechnology

Tags:

• Lipid vesicle
• Osmotic stress
• Transient pore
• drug delivery device
• drug delivery

Abstract:

The passage of molecules, especially large ones, through the cellular membrane is a very important problem for some biotechnological applications, such as drug delivery. The appearance of pores in the lipid bilayer following some controlled mechanisms may be an adequate and interesting way. Some pores, named stochastic pores, can appear due to structural and dynamic properties of lipid bilayer, but others may be favored by mechanical tension induced by different ways. Recently, a sequence of 30-40 pores was observed in the same vesicle, a pore at a time, which can appear in vesicles stretched by optical induced mechanical tension. There are two very interesting biotechnological applications that require the increase of membrane permeability: gene therapy and targeted drug delivery. In the first one, the transport of DNA fragments through cellular and nuclear membranes is required. The second application uses drug molecules encapsulated in vesicles, which have to be transported to a target place. Having reached that point, one supposes that the liposome discharges its content by its breakdown. In this paper, we will write about how a lipid vesicle has to release the drug molecules in a well-controlled fashion. Such liposomes are named pulsatory liposomes and they induce cyclic activity. We will demonstrate that this liposome may be programmed to work a certain number of cycles, settled in advance. Also, we will calculate the amount of drug delivered during each cycle. In fact, a pulsatory liposome may be conceived as a drug dose micro device, which works according to a medical prescription established a priori.

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This document is licensed to the public under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License

How to cite this document:

Popescu, Dumitru and Popescu, Alin Gabriel. An intelligent liposome that may deliver drug molecules in a well controlled fashion. Available from Nature Precedings <http://hdl.handle.net/10101/npre.2007.1220.1> (2007)

Version info:

Published version:

10.1016/j.jtbi.2008.07.009 (Peer Reviewed) Published as: Dumitru Popescu and Alin Gabriel Popescu. The working of a pulsatory liposome. Journal of Theoretical Biology 254, 515-519 (2008). Available online July 15, 2008.

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