‘Functional magnetic nanoparticles’ that remove infectious diseases such as viruses from patient’s blood have been developed.
The Ulsan Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST, UNIST) Biomedical Engineering Department Professor Joo-Heon Kang’s team announced on the 26th that they have developed a ‘blood cell membrane-magnetic nanoparticle’ that covers the surface of magnetic nanoparticles with a blood cell membrane.
The research team said that by reacting ‘functional magnetic nanoparticles’ developed by using the characteristics of the surface of red blood cells or white blood cells that catch and protect the human body to the blood of a patient circulating outside the body, they can catch pathogens such as bacteria or viruses and then recover them with a magnet. explained.
In this way, multidrug-resistant bacteria and viruses, which are the main causes of infection, are captured by substances derived from the cell membranes of red blood cells and white blood cells coated on the surface of magnetic nanoparticles, and the effect of removing pathogens can be enhanced through interaction with opsonins in the blood. .
The research team demonstrated the therapeutic effect of methicillin-resistant S. aureus and carbapenem-resistant E. coli, which are known to be difficult to treat with conventional antibiotics, in an experiment using mice.
According to the research team, when the newly developed blood purification treatment was performed on the mice infected with these bacteria, all of them survived, and the immune system returned to normal a week following the treatment. In addition, when blood purification treatment was continuously performed on infected mice, the concentration of pathogenic microorganisms that had infiltrated the lungs or kidneys according to bacterial infection also decreased.
The research team expects that if the ‘blood cell membrane-blood purification technology using magnetic nanoparticles’ developed this time is combined with the treatment of sepsis or secondary bacterial infection in the intensive care unit, the therapeutic effect will be great. In particular, as the number of infections with secondary antibiotic-resistant bacteria in the intensive care unit is increasing, it can help in the treatment and management of critically ill patients who are hospitalized for the novel coronavirus infection (COVID-19).
Professor Joo-Heon Kang, the research director, said, “It is a technology that mimics the immune response principle our body has innate and can remove many types of infectious agents without prior diagnosis. We plan to develop it as a next-generation infectious disease treatment technology that can quickly respond to epidemics.”
The results of this study were published in the online edition of ‘Small’ published by Wiley on September 7.
Meanwhile, in this research, researchers Lee Min-seok, Jang Bong-hwan, and Axel E. Guzmán-Cedillo from the Department of Biomedical Engineering at UNIST participated in this research.