Improving Cellular Uptake of Nanogels Drug Delivery Vehicles

Drug Delivery is an important area of study because nearly all drugs have some off target toxicity and/or sides. The use of drug delivery vehicles will enable greater effective dosages at the point of the pathology while using a lower overall drug dosage. In this project, nanogel micelles are used as a delivery vehicle. These nanogels sequester the drug and physically prevents the drug for interacting until it is release. The polymer that composes the nanogels has both hydrophobic and the hydrophilic monomers. These hydrophobic monomers contain a disulfide bond that is used to both covalently crosslink and add Biotin functionality.

However, to get into the cell the nanogel must transverse the targeted cell's membrane. Streptavidin labeled antibodies are bound to the nanogel through the strong biotin-streptavidin interaction. This enables specific targeting of certain cell- types and receptor mediated endocytosis to facilitate the entrance of the nanogel into the target cell. Once in the cell, the chemical environment of the cell cause the nanogel to uncross link and the guess molecule is released. Potentially this method will provide an easily means to selectively deliver a guess molecule by changing only the streptavidin-labeled antibody that the Nanogel incubated with prior to adding the said Nanogel to a cell culture. Hopefully, this method can aid in the identification of the better cell markers for targeting with drug delivery vehicles.