Expert Opinion on Drug Delivery | 2019
Can naturally occurring nanoparticle-based targeted drug delivery effectively treat inflammatory bowel disease?
Abstract
Nanoparticle (NP)-based drug delivery is a promising approach for delivering drugs to target tissues by overcoming physiological barriers [1,2]. Traditionally formulated drugs (such as tablets or powders for oral administration, solutions or emulsions for intravenous injection) are designed to improve the bioavailability of therapeutic agents to the whole body. In contrast, targeted NP drug delivery focuses on enhancing the bio-distribution of the drug to the affected organ (such as intestine) and reducing the drug’s systemic partition. Targeted NP-delivered drugs have significant advantages over traditional drugs, which include their greater biodistribution in the specific tissue, better efficacy toward the disease, and fewer side effects to healthy organs [3]. These advantages make targeted NP-based drug delivery particularly beneficial for the treatment of chronic diseases, as they can avoid the accumulated side effects of conventional drugs during long-term treatment [4]. Therefore, targeted NPs represent an ideal drug delivery system for chronic inflammations, such as inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) [5]. Today, artificially synthesized NPs are the most widely studied targeted platform for delivering therapeutics (such as chemical drugs, siRNAs, proteins, and peptides) to the intestine [6,7]. Although various strategies (including pH-dependent, ROS-responsive, hydrogel-based, and active targeting nanodelivery) have been developed for generating synthetic targeted NPs [8], the high cost of their mass production has limited their applications [9]. Further, for clinical translations, each constituent of the synthesized NPs should be subjected to a comprehensive safety evaluation along with the reduced cost for scaling up synthetic NP production [10]. The use of recently developed targeted NPs derived from naturally occurring NPs (such as edible plant-derived NPs or mammalian cell-derived extracellular vesicles) may overcome these limitations of synthetic NPs (Figure 1). In fact, natural NPs offer a safer, more sustainable, and better economic drug delivery system. NPs made from natural polymers, including chitosan, sulfated polysaccharides (from marine algae), silk fibroin, and poly amino acids, have been extensively studied and reviewed for their anti-inflammatory potentials [11–15]. In this editorial, we will mainly focus on the new trend of applying novel edible plantand mammalian cell-derived NP drug delivery systems for IBD treatments.