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Acute lung inflammation is one of the main causes of death in COVID-19. A potential new route to the diagnosis and treatment of ARDS comes from studying how the white blood cells that are responsible for detecting and eliminating harmful particles in the body differ in how they take in certain particles. The findings are published in a journal.
The researchers looked at how the neutrophils can differentiate between compounds in the bloodstream. They found a set of "rules" that predict the amount of neutrophils in mice with a library of 23 different nanoparticles. Neutrophils don't take up symmetrical, rigid particles, but they do take up particles that clump together, which the researchers call nanoparticles with agglutinated protein.
"We want to use the existing function of the neutrophils to inform how to design a 'Trojan horse' nanoparticle that will be able to alleviate ALI and ARDS," said the study lead author. We had to figure out how neutrophils identify which particles in the blood to take up in order to build the 'Trojan horse' delivery system.
ALI and ARDS are life threatening forms of respiratory failure. There were 190,000 annual cases of ARDS in the U.S. prior to COVID-19. The number of ARDS cases has increased. The lung's air sacs recruit neutrophils to the lungs in order to eliminate circulating microbes when ALI or ARDS occurs. Patients develop low blood oxygen levels because of the process that causes the release of compounds by the neutrophils. Despite the severity of ALI/ARDS, there is no effective drug to control it, and treatment currently focuses on supporting patients while the lungs heal slowly.
Researchers at Penn and elsewhere have been using nanoparticles to concentrate drugs in injured or sick organs. Gene therapy and immunotherapy are being done with such nanoparticles.
The researchers note that while the development of viable therapies for ALI/ARDS using nanoparticles to deliver treatments via neutrophils are a long way off, this research represents a significant step in understanding the condition and function of the immune system.
The next step is to understand how and why other microbes evolved to evade neutrophils after we discovered that they patrol for nanoparticles with agglutinated protein. "With this knowledge, we can continue to utilize this unique combination of material science and engineering, to create disease-specific therapies that target more advanced and complicated pathologies."
Jacob W. Myerson and his team studied the relationship between tropism for neutrophils in acute lung inflammation and the structure of the nanoparticle. The DOI is 10.1038/s41565-021-00997-y.
Nature Nanotechnology journal has information.
The structural blueprints of nanoparticles were retrieved from thephys.org on December 27th, 2021.
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