Innovative therapeutic approach with nanocarriers
For the jury around BioPark managing director Dr. Thomas Diefenthal, patent attorney Dr. Berthold Bettenhausen, Prof. Dr. Bernhard Weber from the University of Regensburg and the Vice President of the OTH Regensburg Prof. Dr. Klaudia Winkler it was not easy to choose this year's award winner from the high-quality applications. The decisive factors were the innovative strength and application potential of the work. Dr. Daniel Fleischmann from the working group of Prof. Dr. Achim Göpferich from the Chair of Pharmaceutical Technologies at the University of Regensburg received the prize.
Numerous novel drug candidates fail as they do not quite reach their site of action in the organism. These include highly potent substances which, in very low concentrations, could trigger therapeutic effects on their target cells, but which they do not achieve due to unfavorable chemical-structural properties. Nanoparticles can act as “ferries” for drugs and help to solve this problem. In practice, however, synthetic nanoparticles often fail to selectively recognize their target cells. One possible solution to the problem is the use of viruses as “natural nanoparticles”. The key to the successful infection of the virus lies in the precise interaction of the virus surface with the cell membrane of the target cell, in which the virus normally reproduces. Viruses can feel these highly complex biological interactions like fingerprints in order to differentiate between cells.
The doctoral project of Dr. Fleischmann used the imitation of this viral strategy to produce intelligent nanoparticles in order to be able to use these for targeted treatment of diabetic nephropathy. There is currently no therapy for this disease, which threatens more than half of all diabetics and thus more than 200 million people worldwide with total kidney failure. In the research work, a nanocarrier was developed with which promising drugs can be introduced into the cells of the mesangium in a targeted manner. For this purpose, the surfaces of nanoparticles were “programmed” in such a way that, like viruses, they are able to scan cell surfaces in order to determine the identity of cells. In cell mixtures, the adenovirus-mimetic nanoparticles are able to recognize mesangial cells in a highly selective manner and to be exclusively absorbed by these.
