Monday, October 11, 2010
Potential Oral Treatment for Inflammatory Bowel Diseases
Image: When delivered orally, thioketal nanoparticles remain stable in the harsh environment of the gastrointestinal tract, protecting siRNA and preventing its release to non-inflamed tissues (top). However, at sites of intestinal inflammation where unusually high levels of reactive oxygen species are present, the thioketal nanoparticles degrade and release siRNA to the site of inflammation (bottom).
From Georgia Institute of Technology, Research Communications
Researchers are working on an oral delivery treatment to administer small bits of genetic material into the body to improve the treatment of inflammatory bowel diseases. Delivering short strands of RNA into cells has become a popular research area because of its potential therapeutic applications, but how to deliver them into targeted cells in a living organism has been an obstacle.
To solve this problem, they encapsulated short pieces of RNA into engineered particles called thioketal nanoparticles and orally delivered the genetic material directly to the inflamed intestines of animals.
“The thioketal nanoparticles break open to release the pieces of RNA in the presence of inflamed tissue in the gastrointestinal tract of individuals with inflammatory bowel diseases,” said Niren Murthy, an associate professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University, involved in the study.
The thioketal nanoparticles protect the small interfering RNAs (siRNAs) from the harsh environment of the gastrointestinal tract and target them directly to the inflamed intestinal tissues.
For their experiments, the researchers used a mouse model of ulcerative colitis—a debilitating inflammatory bowel disease in which the digestive tract becomes inflamed, causing severe diarrhea and abdominal pain that can lead to life-threatening complications.
In the future, thioketal nanoparticles may become a significant player in the treatment of numerous gastrointestinal diseases linked to intestinal inflammation, including gastrointestinal cancers, inflammatory bowel diseases and viral infections.
Read the full article here.
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