- Aditya G
Red Blood Cells commonly also known RBCs travel 250 km throughout the cardiovascular system, they have a thickness of 2 micrometers, a diameter of 7 micrometer and occupy an area of 160 micrometers. Primary function of these cells in the body is to transport oxygen but the dimensions of RBC and its wide reach also make it a suitable vehicle for the transport of drug molecules.
Certain infections target organs or parts of the body where drugs may not be able to reach making the treatment of these infections more challenging. One such site is the Blood Brain Barrier(BBB), a vasculature of the central nervous system that acts as a physical barrier and imposes various obstacles.
It inhibits delivery of therapeutic agents to the CNS and imposes obstruction for delivery of large number of drugs, including antibiotics, antineoplastic agents and neuropeptides to pass through the endothelial capillaries to brain. Though several drug delivery methods and strategies have been developed for CNS related disease therapeutics, most of them are invasive and lack the target specificity.
To target such sites where drugs cannot reach, but RBC’s can, hence RBC’S are used as a drug carrier to fight the infection. The methods mentioned below are very effective, efficient and promises safety. RBCs act as drug carriers and fight out the infections in the infected site. There are various methods by which we can load the drugs and make RBC a drug carrier to fight infections. Methods such as electroporation, osmosis based, co-incubation, bio-bridges and CPP-mediation are most common. Drug delivery by Nano Carriers(NC) is often stymied by dominant liver uptake and limited target organ deposition. Hence the solution to this is to let RBC shuttle Nano-scale drug carriers and this method is called RBC-Hitchhiking(RH).
The research team in University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, showed that RBC-Hitchhiking(RH) can safely transport Nano-scale carriers of drugs to chosen organs by targeted placement of intravascular catheters in mice, pigs, ex-vivo human lungs with no organ toxicities. The researchers found that RBC-Hitchhiking(RH) drug carriers when injected Intra-venously(IV) in the lungs, drug uptake is increased by about 40 folds as compared to other methods.
Hence this method provides drugs to affected area of target. Hence fights the diseases. This method is also used to acute heart strokes. Also injecting RBC-Hitchhiking drug carriers into the carotid artery, 10% of the drugs are carried to the brain.
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