Bioinspired Nanoparticles for Efficient Drug Delivery System

Introduction

Human biological system is made up of nanoscale particles that self-assembled to build biological tissues (Bhattacharya et al.,2014). It is well known that nanoparticles can be synthesized in several routes such as microwave, autoclave, sol-gel and other chemical routes resulting in different shapes and sizes. Hence, nanoparticles (NPs) has the suitable size to powerfully influence the biological systems, add to that their unique physical and chemical properties (Bhattacharya et al.,2014) .Therefore, NPs have been recently involved in a wide range of biomedical applications in particular biosensors (Bhattacharya,2014), biomolecular electronics (Bhattacharya et al.,2014) and drug delivery (Bhattacharya et al., 2014), (Thasneem et al., 2013) (Costa et al., 2014) (Peib et al., 2014). Today, NPs have been involved in the delivery of drugs for various sites and purposes including cancer therapy (Athinarayanan et al., 2015) Yigit et al., 2012) (Rena et al., 2013) (Ma'mani et al., 2014) (Jin et al., 2014) (Liechty et al., 2012), skin diseases (Tarl et al., 2011), heart diseases (Sylvester et al. 2013), ophthalmic disease (Jung et al., 2012) (Venkatesh et al., 2007), imaging purposes (Zhou et al., 2009)(Zhou et al., 2014), and gene delivery (Luvino et al., 2013).

During last decades, with the raise of advanced technologies, the synthesis of NPs has been developing rapidly allowing scientists to create advanced designs of nanoscale compounds that mimic natural systems in a very precise manner. Recently, bioinspired NPs have been applied in various biomedical applications and in particular in drug delivery. Most of these drugs delivered using a bioinspired design nanoscale compounds are cancer drugs. (Jin et al., 2014) reported the history of bioinspired NPs as a delivery vehicles of cancer drugs.

Natural nanocarriers that are found in biological systems circulating cargo in a prolonged and sustained manner have been the inspiration for researchers to design NPs that mimics the natural system (Chen et al., 2012) in uploading, delivering and releasing substances thereby apply this in drug delivery system (Yoo et al., 2011) (Wang Y. et al., 2014). Examples of natural nanocarriers are exosomes (Johnsen et al., 2014) (Stanley, 2014) (Johnsen et al., 2014), lipoprotiens (Stanley, 2014), Ferritin magnetites (Stanley, 2014), viruses (Stanley, 2014), extracellular vesicles (Meel et al., 2014), magnetic graphite (Ribeiro et al., 2014), microbes (Althuri et al., 2013) and self assembeled chitosan nanomaterials (Yang et al., 2014).

Approaches of mimicking natural carriers included, reproducing the characteristics of natural surfaces to build shelled carriers made of variety of structures (layer by layer approach) (Lorenzo et al., 2013), mimicking natural hard tissues (Lorenzo et al, 2013), (Wang S. et al., 2013), (Morton et al., 2013), mimicking pathogens (virus/bacteria like NPs) (Lorenzo et al., 2013), (Prozorov, 2013) and including natural materials during synthesis to enhance biocompatibility (Bae et al., 2011) (Yoo et al., 2011). For instance, bioinspired NPs such as polymeric NPs (Yoo et al., 2011) (Krannig et al., 2014) (Calderón et al., 2010) (Rica et al., 2012) (Jing et al., 2013), liposomes (Yoo et al., 2011) Rica et al., 2012), micelles (Yoo et al., 2011) (Costa et al., 2014) and protein based NPs (Bhattacharya et al. 2014) were functionalised for a successful drug delivery system which can achieve loading of relatively stable amounts of drugs with minimum leakage and side effects with steady and prolonged release (Lorenzo et al, 2013) (Jang S. et al., 2013) (Yoo et al., 2011). Furthermore, these bioinspired carriers should be affected by natural physiological conditions (pH, temperature and concentration) in order to control the release of drugs.