What Drives Innovation: The Canadian Touch on Liposomal Therapeutics

A synthetic model of bioinspired liposomes to study cancer-cell derived extracellular vesicles and their uptake by recipient cells

Extracellular vesicles (EVs) are secreted by most cell types and play a central role in cell-cell communication. These naturally occurring nanoparticles have been particularly implicated in cancer, but EV heterogeneity and lengthy isolation methods with low yield make them difficult to study. To circumvent the challenges in EV research, we aimed to develop a unique synthetic model by engineering bioinspired liposomes to study EV properties and their impact on cellular uptake. We produced EV-like liposomes mimicking the physicochemical properties as cancer EVs. First, using a panel of cancer and non-cancer cell lines, small EVs were isolated by ultracentrifugation and characterized by dynamic light scattering (DLS) and nanoparticle tracking analysis (NTA). Cancer EVs ranged in mean size from 107.9 to 161 nm by NTA, hydrodynamic diameter from 152 to 355 nm by DLS, with a zeta potential ranging from - 25 to -6 mV. EV markers TSG101 and CD81 were positive on all EVs. Using a microfluidics bottom-up approach, liposomes were produced using the nanoprecipitation method adapted to micromixers developed by our group. A library of liposome formulations was created that mimicked the ranges of size (90-222 nm) and zeta potential (anionic [-47 mV] to neutral [-1 mV]) at a production throughput of up to 41 mL/h and yielding a concentration of 1 × 1012 particles per mL. EV size and zeta potential were reproduced by controlling the flow conditions and lipid composition set by a statistical model based on the response surface methodology. The model was fairly accurate with an R-squared > 70% for both parameters between the targeted EV and the obtained liposomes. Finally, the internalization of fluorescently labeled EV-like liposomes was assessed by confocal microscopy and flow cytometry, and correlated with decreasing liposome size and less negative zeta potential, providing insights into the effects of key EV physicochemical properties. Our data demonstrated that liposomes can be used as a powerful synthetic model of EVs. By mimicking cancer cell-derived EV properties, the effects on cellular internalization can be assessed individually and in combination. Taken together, we present a novel system that can accelerate research on the effects of EVs in cancer models.

Enhancing Drug Solubility, Bioavailability, and Targeted Therapeutic Applications through Magnetic Nanoparticles

Biological variability poses significant challenges in the development of effective therapeutics, particularly when it comes to drug solubility and bioavailability. Poor solubility across varying physiological conditions often leads to reduced absorption and inconsistent therapeutic outcomes. This review examines how nanotechnology, especially through the use of nanomaterials and magnetic nanoparticles, offers innovative solutions to enhance drug solubility and bioavailability. This comprehensive review focuses on recent advancements and approaches in nanotechnology. We highlight both the successes and remaining challenges in this field, emphasizing the role of continued innovation. Future research should prioritize developing universal therapeutic solutions, conducting interdisciplinary research, and leveraging personalized nanomedicine to address biological variability.

Innovative Pharmaceutical Techniques for Paediatric Dosage Forms: A Systematic Review on 3D Printing, Prilling/Vibration and Microfluidic Platform

The production of paediatric pharmaceutical forms represents a unique challenge within the pharmaceutical industry. The primary goal of these formulations is to ensure therapeutic efficacy, safety, and tolerability in paediatric patients, who have specific physiological needs and characteristics. In recent years, there has been a significant increase in attention towards this area, driven by the need to improve drug administration to children and ensure optimal and specific treatments. Technological innovation has played a crucial role in meeting these requirements, opening new frontiers in the design and production of paediatric pharmaceutical forms. In particular, three emerging technologies have garnered considerable interest and attention within the scientific and industrial community: 3D printing, prilling/vibration, and microfluidics. These technologies offer advanced approaches for the design, production, and customization of paediatric pharmaceutical forms, allowing for more precise dosage modulation, improved solubility, and greater drug acceptability. In this review, we delve into these cutting-edge technologies and their impact on the production of paediatric pharmaceutical forms. We analyse their potential, associated challenges, and recent developments, providing a comprehensive overview of the opportunities that these innovative methodologies offer to the pharmaceutical sector. We examine different pharmaceutical forms generated using these techniques, evaluating their advantages and disadvantages.

Intelligent Biomaterialomics: Molecular Design, Manufacturing, and Biomedical Applications

Materialomics integrates experiment, theory, and computation in a high-throughput manner, and has changed the paradigm for the research and development of new functional materials. Recently, with the rapid development of high-throughput characterization and machine-learning technologies, the establishment of biomaterialomics that tackles complex physiological behaviors has become accessible. Breakthroughs in the clinical translation of nanoparticle-based therapeutics and vaccines have been observed. Herein, recent advances in biomaterials, including polymers, lipid-like materials, and peptides/proteins, discovered through high-throughput screening or machine learning-assisted methods, are summarized. The molecular design of structure-diversified libraries; high-throughput characterization, screening, and preparation; and, their applications in drug delivery and clinical translation are discussed in detail. Furthermore, the prospects and main challenges in future biomaterialomics and high-throughput screening development are highlighted.

Exploring the use of niosomes in cosmetics for efficient dermal drug delivery

Dermal drug delivery has emerged as a promising alternative to traditional methods of drug administration due to its non-invasive nature and ease of use. However, the stratum corneum, the outermost layer of the skin, presents a significant barrier to drug penetration. Niosomes, self-assembled vesicular structures composed of nonionic surfactants and cholesterol, have been extensively investigated as a means of overcoming this barrier and improving the efficacy of dermal drug delivery. This review summarizes the current state of research on the use of niosomes in dermal drug delivery in cosmetics, with a particular focus on their formulation, characterization, and application in the delivery of various drug classes. The review highlights the advantages of niosomes over conventional drug delivery methods, including improved solubility and stability of drugs, controlled release, and enhanced skin permeation. The review also discusses the challenges associated with niosome-based drug delivery, such as their complex formulation and optimization, and the need for further studies on their long-term safety and toxicity.

Microfluidic Nanoparticles for Drug Delivery

Nanoparticles (NPs) have attracted tremendous interest in drug delivery in the past decades. Microfluidics offers a promising strategy for making NPs for drug delivery due to its capability in precisely controlling NP properties. The recent success of mRNA vaccines using microfluidics represents a big milestone for microfluidic NPs for pharmaceutical applications, and its rapid scaling up demonstrates the feasibility of using microfluidics for industrial-scale manufacturing. This article provides a critical review of recent progress in microfluidic NPs for drug delivery. First, the synthesis of organic NPs using microfluidics focusing on typical microfluidic methods and their applications in making popular and clinically relevant NPs, such as liposomes, lipid NPs, and polymer NPs, as well as their synthesis mechanisms are summarized. Then, the microfluidic synthesis of several representative inorganic NPs (e.g., silica, metal, metal oxide, and quantum dots), and hybrid NPs is discussed. Lastly, the applications of microfluidic NPs for various drug delivery applications are presented.

Metal complex-based liposomes: Applications and prospects in cancer diagnostics and therapeutics

Metal complexes are of increasing interest as pharmaceutical agents in cancer diagnostics and therapeutics, while some of them suffer from issues such as limited water solubility and severe systemic toxicity. These drawbacks severely hampered their efficacy and clinical applications. Liposomes hold promise as delivery vehicles for constructing metal complex-based liposomes to maximize the therapeutic efficacy and minimize the side effects of metal complexes. This review provides an overview on the latest advances of metal complex-based liposomal delivery systems. First, the development of metal complex-mediated liposomal encapsulation is briefly introduced. Next, applications of metal complex-based liposomes in a variety of fields are overviewed, where drug delivery, cancer imaging (single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT), positron emission tomography (PET), and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)), and cancer therapy (chemotherapy, phototherapy, and radiotherapy) were involved. Moreover, the potential toxicity, action of toxic mechanisms, immunological effects of metal complexes as well as the advantages of metal complex-liposomes in this content are also discussed. In the end, the future expectations and challenges of metal complex-based liposomes in clinical cancer therapy are tentatively proposed.

Carbohydrate anchored lipid nanoparticles

Nanotechnology has been a dynamic field for formulation scientists with multidisciplinary research being conducted worldwide. Advancements in development of functional nanosystems have led to evolution of breakthrough technologies. Lipidic nanosystems, in particular, are highly preferred owing to their non-immunogenic safety profiles along with a range of versatile intrinsic properties. Surface modification of lipid nanoparticles by anchoring carbohydrates to these systems is one such attractive drug delivery technology. Carbohydrates confer interesting properties to the nanosystems such as stealth, biostability, bioavailability, reduced toxicity due to decreased immunogenic response, targeting potential as well as ease of commercial availability. The carbohydrate anchored systems can be developed using methods such as adsorption, incorporation (nanoprecipitation or solvent displacement method), crosslinking and grafting. Current review provides a detailed overview of potential lipid based nanoparticulate systems with an emphasis on liposomes, solid lipid nanoparticles, nanostructures lipid carriers and micelles. Review further explores basics of surface modification, methods applied therein, advantages of carbohydrates as surface modifiers, their versatile applications, techniques for characterization of carbohydrate anchored systems and vital regulatory aspects concerned with these specialized systems.

The Use of Nanomedicine to Target Signaling by the PAK Kinases for Disease Treatment

P21-activated kinases (PAKs) are serine/threonine kinases involved in the regulation of cell survival, proliferation, inhibition of apoptosis, and the regulation of cell morphology. Some members of the PAK family are highly expressed in several types of cancer, and they have also been implicated in several other medical disorders. They are thus considered to be good targets for treatment of cancer and other diseases. Although there are several inhibitors of the PAKs, the utility of some of these inhibitors is reduced for several reasons, including limited metabolic stability. One way to overcome this problem is the use of nanoparticles, which have the potential to increase drug delivery. The overall goals of this review are to describe the roles for PAK kinases in cell signaling and disease, and to describe how the use of nanomedicine is a promising new method for administering PAK inhibitors for the purpose of disease treatment and research. We discuss some of the basic mechanisms behind nanomedicine technology, and we then describe how these techniques are being used to package and deliver PAK inhibitors.

Recent Advances in Herbal Nanomedicines for Cancer Treatment

Cancer continues to be one of the deadliest diseases that adversely impacts the large population of the world. A stack of scientific documents reflects a huge number of potent plant-based anticancer drugs such as curcumin (CUR), podophyllotoxin, camptothecin (CPT), vincristine, vinblastine, paclitaxel (PTX), etc. that have been integrated into the modern practice of cancer treatment. The demand for natural products raises exponentially as they are generally considered to be safe, and devoid of critical toxic effects at the therapeutic dose when compared to their synthetic counterparts. Despite rising interest towards the potent phytoconstituents, formulation developer faces various challenges in drug development processes such as poor water solubility, low bioavailability, marginal permeability, and nonspecific drug delivery at the target site, etc. Further, adverse drug reaction and multidrug resistance are other critical issues that need to be addressed. Nanomedicines owing to their unique structural and functional attributes help to fix the above challenges for improved translational outcomes. This review summarises the prospects and challenges of a nanotechnology-based drug delivery approach for the delivery of plant-based anticancer drugs.

Polymeric and Lipid Nanoparticles: Which Applications in Pediatrics?

This review aims to provide the state of the art on polymeric and lipid nanoparticles, used or suggested to approach pediatric diseases’ problems and needs, and to inspire new researches in this field. Several drugs are currently not available in formulations suitable for pediatric patients. The United States Pediatric Formulation Initiative suggested applying new technologies to pediatric drug formulations, for instance, nanotechnology. The literature analysis showed that polymeric and lipid nanoparticles have been widely studied to treat pediatric diseases, and albumin nanoparticles and liposomes are already used in clinical practice. Nevertheless, these studies are focused almost exclusively on pediatric cancer treatment. Although nanomedicine may solve many needs of pediatric diseases and medicines, the unavailability of data on pharmacokinetics, safety and efficacy of both drugs and nanoparticles in pediatric patients limits the development of new pediatric medicines based on nanoparticles. Therefore, nanomedicine applied in pediatrics remains a significant challenge in the near future.

Rationale and Application of PEGylated Lipid-Based System for Advanced Target Delivery of siRNA

RNA interference (RNAi) technology has become a powerful tool in application of unraveling the mechanism of disease and may hold the potential to be developed for clinical uses. Small interfering RNA (siRNA) can bind to target mRNA with high specificity and efficacy and thus inhibit the expression of related protein for the purpose of treatment of diseases. The major challenge for RNAi application is how to improve its stability and bioactivity and therefore deliver therapeutic agents to the target sites with high efficiency and accuracy. PEGylated lipid-based delivery system has been widely used for development of various medicines due to its long circulating half-life time, low toxicity, biocompatibility, and easiness to be scaled up. The PEGylated lipid-based delivery system may also provide platform for targeting delivery of nucleic acids, and some of the research works have moved to the phases for clinical trials. In this review, we introduced the mechanism, major challenges, and strategies to overcome technical barriers of PEGylated lipid-based delivery systems for advanced target delivery of siRNA in vivo. We also summarized recent advance of PEGylated lipid-based siRNA delivery systems and included some successful research works in this field.

Detection of material-derived differences in the stiffness of egg yolk phosphatidylcholine-containing liposomes using atomic force microscopy

Naturally sourced phospholipids are used in many liposomal pharmaceuticals. The present report describes a method to detect the effects of different egg yolk phosphatidylcholines (EPCs) on liposomal physicochemical properties. Five EPC-containing liposomes were prepared using five different EPCs obtained from different suppliers. There was no significant difference in purity between each EPC. The stiffness of the liposomes was examined via atomic force microscopy (AFM) in relation to the liposomal membrane permeability coefficient of encapsulated calcein after gel filtration, which is indicative of liposomal stability including the release of a hydrophilic drug from a liposome. Although the size of the liposome and the encapsulation efficiency of calcein did not significantly change with the type of EPC used, the liposome stiffness was found to vary depending on the EPC used, and liposomes with a similar stiffness were found to show a similar membrane permeability to calcein. Our results indicate the usefulness of stiffness measurement, using AFM as the analytical method, to detect material-derived differences in EPC-containing liposomes that affect drug release from the liposomes. Because drug release is one of the most important liposomal functions, combining this method with other analytical methods could be useful in selecting material for the development and quality control of EPC-containing liposomes.

Lipid-based nanoparticle formulations for small molecules and RNA drugs

Introduction: Liposomes and lipid-based nanoparticles (LNPs) effectively deliver cargo molecules to specific tissues, cells, and cellular compartments. Patients benefit from these nanoparticle formulations by altered pharmacokinetic properties, higher efficacy, or reduced side effects. While liposomes are an established delivery option for small molecules, Onpattro® (Sanofi Genzyme, Cambridge, MA) is the first commercially available LNP formulation of a small interfering ribonucleic acid (siRNA). Areas covered: This review article summarizes key features of liposomal formulations for small molecule drugs and LNP formulations for RNA therapeutics. We describe liposomal formulations that are commercially available or in late-stage clinical development and the most promising LNP formulations for ASOs, siRNAs, saRNA, and mRNA therapeutics. Expert opinion: Similar to liposomes, LNPs for RNA therapeutics have matured but still possess a niche application status. RNA therapeutics, however, bear an immense hope for difficult to treat diseases and fuel the imagination for further applications of RNA drugs. LNPs face similar challenges as liposomes including limitations in biodistribution, the risk to provoke immune responses, and other toxicities. However, since properties of RNA molecules within the same group are very similar, the entire class of therapeutic molecules would benefit from improvements in a few key parameters of the delivery technology.

Drug Delivery Technology Development in Canada

Canada has a long and rich history of ground-breaking research in drug delivery within academic institutions, pharmaceutical industry and the biotechnology community. Drug delivery refers to approaches, formulations, technologies, and systems for transporting a pharmaceutical compound in the body as needed to safely achieve its desired therapeutic effect. It may involve rational site-targeting, or facilitating systemic pharmacokinetics; in any case, it is typically concerned with both quantity and duration of the presence of the drug in the body. Drug delivery is often approached through a drug’s chemical formulation, medical devices or drug-device combination products. Drug delivery is a concept heavily integrated with dosage form development and selection of route of administration; the latter sometimes even being considered part of the definition. Drug delivery technologies modify drug release profile, absorption, distribution and elimination for the benefit of improving product efficacy and safety, as well as patient convenience and adherence. Over the past 30 years, numerous Canadian-based biotechnology companies have been formed stemming from the inventions conceived and developed within academic institutions. Many have led to the development of important drug delivery products that have enhanced the landscape of drug therapy in the treatment of cancer to infectious diseases. This Special Issue serves to highlight the progress of drug delivery within Canada. We invited articles on all aspects of drug delivery sciences from pre-clinical formulation development to human clinical trials that bring to light the world-class research currently undertaken in Canada for this Special Issue.

Rapid Microfluidic Preparation of Niosomes for Targeted Drug Delivery

Niosomes are non-ionic surfactant-based vesicles with high promise for drug delivery applications. They can be rapidly prepared via microfluidics, allowing their reproducible production without the need of a subsequent size reduction step, by controlled mixing of two miscible phases of an organic (lipids dissolved in alcohol) and an aqueous solution in a microchannel. The control of niosome properties and the implementation of more complex functions, however, thus far are largely unknown for this method. Here we investigate microfluidics-based manufacturing of topotecan (TPT)-loaded polyethylene glycolated niosomes (PEGNIO). The flow rate ratio of the organic and aqueous phases was varied and optimized. Furthermore, the surface of TPT-loaded PEGNIO was modified with a tumor homing and penetrating peptide (tLyp-1). The designed nanoparticular drug delivery system composed of PEGNIO-TPT-tLyp-1 was fabricated for the first time via microfluidics in this study. The physicochemical properties were determined through dynamic light scattering (DLS) and zeta potential analysis. In vitro studies of the obtained formulations were performed on human glioblastoma (U87) cells. The results clearly indicated that tLyp-1-functionalized TPT-loaded niosomes could significantly improve anti-glioma treatment.

Latest Advances in the Development of Eukaryotic Vaults as Targeted Drug Delivery Systems

The use of smart drug delivery systems (DDSs) is one of the most promising approaches to overcome some of the drawbacks of drug-based therapies, such as improper biodistribution and lack of specific targeting. Some of the most attractive candidates as DDSs are naturally occurring, self-assembling protein nanoparticles, such as viruses, virus-like particles, ferritin cages, bacterial microcompartments, or eukaryotic vaults. Vaults are large ribonucleoprotein nanoparticles present in almost all eukaryotic cells. Expression in different cell factories of recombinant versions of the "major vault protein" (MVP) results in the production of recombinant vaults indistinguishable from native counterparts. Such recombinant vaults can encapsulate virtually any cargo protein, and they can be specifically targeted by engineering the C-terminus of MVP monomer. These properties, together with nanometric size, a lumen large enough to accommodate cargo molecules, biodegradability, biocompatibility and no immunogenicity, has raised the interest in vaults as smart DDSs. In this work we provide an overview of eukaryotic vaults as a new, self-assembling protein-based DDS, focusing in the latest advances in the production and purification of this platform, its application in nanomedicine, and the current preclinical and clinical assays going on based on this nanovehicle.