Leaders in Pharmaceutical Business Intelligence (LPBI) Group

Liposomes, Lipidomics and Metabolism

Larry H. Bernstein, MD, FCAP, Curator

LPBI

 

Building a Better Liposome

Computational models suggest new design for nanoparticles used in targeted drug delivery.

http://www.technologynetworks.com/Metabolomics/news.aspx?ID=184147

Using computational modeling, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, the Colorado School of Mines and the University of California, Davis have come up with a design for a better liposome. Their findings, while theoretical, could provide the basis for efficiently constructing new vehicles for nanodrug delivery.

Liposomes are small containers with shells made of lipids, the same material that makes up the cell membrane. In recent years, liposomes have been used for targeted drug delivery. In this process, the membrane of a drug-containing liposome is engineered to contain proteins that will recognize and interact with complementary proteins on the membrane of a diseased or dysfunctional cell. After the drug-containing liposomes are administered, they travel through the body, ideally connecting with targeted cells where they release the drug.

This packaging technique is often used with highly toxic nanodrugs, like chemotherapy drugs, in an attempt to prevent the free drug from damaging non-cancerous cells. However, studies of this model of delivery have shown that in many cases less than 10 percent of the drugs transported by liposomes end up in tumor cells. Often, the liposome breaks open before it reaches a tumor cell and the drug is absorbed into the body’s organs, including the liver and spleen, resulting in toxic side effects.

“Even with current forms of targeted drug delivery, treatments like chemotherapy are still very brutal. We wanted to see how we could make targeted drug delivery better,” said Markus Deserno, professor of physics at Carnegie Mellon and a member of the university’s Center for Membrane Biology and Biophysics.

Deserno and colleagues propose that targeted drug delivery can be improved by making more stable liposomes. Using three different types of computer modeling, they have shown that liposomes can be made sturdier by incorporating a nanoparticle core made of a material like gold or iron and connecting that core to the liposome’s membrane using polymer tethers. The core and tethers act as a hub-and-spoke-like scaffold and shock-absorber system that help the liposome to weather the stresses and strains it encounters as it travels through the body to its target.

Francesca Stanzione and Amadeu K. Sum of the Colorado School of Mines conducted a fine-grained simulation that looked at how the polymer tethers anchor the liposome’s membrane at an atomistic level. Roland Faller of UC Davis did a meso-scale simulation that looked how a number of tethers held on to a small patch of membrane. Each of these simulations allowed researchers to look at smaller components of the liposome, nanoparticle core and tethers, but not the entire structure.

To see the entire structure, Carnegie Mellon’s Deserno and Mingyang Hu developed a coarse-grained model that represents groupings of components rather than individual atoms. For example, one lipid in the cell membrane might have 100 atoms. In a fine-grain simulation, each atom would be represented. In Deserno’s coarse grain simulation, those atoms might be represented by only three pieces instead of 100.

“Its unfeasible to look at the complete construct at an atomistic level. There are too many atoms to consider, and the timescale is too long. Even with the most advanced supercomputer, we wouldn’t have the power to run an atom-level simulation,” Deserno said. “But the physics that matters isn’t locally specific. It’s more like soft matter physics, which can be described at a much coarser resolution.”

Deserno’s simulation allowed the researchers to see how the entire reinforced liposome construct responded to stress and strain. They proposed that if a liposome was given the right-sized hub and tethers, its membrane would be much more resilient, bending to absorb impact and pressure.

Additionally, they were able to simulate how to best assemble the liposome, hub and tether system. They found that if the hub and tether are attached and placed in a solution of lipids, and solvent conditions are suitably chosen, a correctly sized liposome would self-assemble around the hub and tethers.

The researchers hope that chemists and drug developers will one day be able to use their simulations to determine what size core and polymer tethers they would need to effectively secure a liposome designed to deliver a specific drug or other nanoparticle. Using such simulations could narrow down the design parameters, speed up the development process and reduce costs.

 

Lipotype GmbH and NIHS Collaborate

http://www.technologynetworks.com/Metabolomics/news.aspx?ID=184363

NIHS to use the Lipotype Shotgun Lipidomics Technology for lipid analysis.

Lipotype GmbH and the Nestlé Institute of Health Sciences (NIHS) have collaborated to employ the innovative Lipotype Shotgun Lipidomics Technology to analyze lipids in blood for nutritional research. Recently, Lipotype and NIHS have jointly published results of the robustness of the Lipotype Technology. Lipotype envisions a future use of its technology in clinical diagnostics screens for establishing reliable lipid diagnostic biomarkers. Innovative Lipotype Technology for lipid analysis The purpose of this collaboration is to enable NIHS to use the Lipotype Shotgun Lipidomics Technology for lipid analysis. The mass spectrometry-based Lipotype technology covers a broad spectrum of lipid molecules and delivers quantitative results in high-throughput. The Nestlé Institute of Health Sciences uses this technology platform for nutritional research. NIHS is a specialized biomedical research institute and is part of Nestlé’s global Research & Development network. Joint research project reveals robustness of Lipotype Technology During the collaboration, Lipotype and NIHS conducted a joint research project and demonstrated that the Lipotype technology was robust enough to deliver data with high precision and negligible technical variation between different sites. In addition, important features are the high coverage and throughput, which were confirmed when applying the Lipotype technology. Lipotype envisions these as important features, required for future use in clinical diagnostics screens, in order to establish and validate reliable lipid diagnostic biomarkers. The results have been published in October 2015, in the European Journal of Lipid Science and Technology (Surma et al. “An Automated Shotgun Lipidomics Platform for High Throughput, Comprehensive, and Quantitative Analysis of Blood Plasma Intact Lipids.”). Lipids play an important role for health and disease Lipotype is a spin-off company of the Max-Planck-Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden, Germany. Prof. Kai Simons, CEO of Lipotype explains: “We developed a novel Shotgun-Lipidomics technology to analyze lipids in blood and other biological samples. Our analysis is quick and covers hundreds of lipid molecules at the same time. Our technology can be used to identify disease related lipid signatures.”

 

New Treatment for Obesity Developed

http://www.technologynetworks.com/Metabolomics/news.aspx?ID=183998

Researchers at the University of Liverpool, working with a global healthcare company, have helped develop a new treatment for obesity.

The treatment, which is a once-daily injectable derivative of a metabolic hormone called GLP-1 conventionally used in the treatment of type 2 diabetes, has proved successful in helping non-diabetic obese patients lose weight. Professor John Wilding, who leads Obesity and Endocrinology research in the Institute of Ageing and Chronic Disease, investigates the pathophysiology and treatment of both obesity and type 2 diabetes and is applying his expertise in this area to work with, and often act as a consultant for, a number of large pharmaceutical companies looking to develop new treatments for obesity and diabetes. Exciting development Professor Wilding, said: “The biology of GLP-1 has been a focus of my research for 20 years; in particular when I was working at Hammersmith Hospital in London, I was part of the team that demonstrated that it was involved in appetite regulation; work on GLP-1 has continued during my time in Liverpool. Being involved in the development of a treatment, from the basic research right through to clinical trials in patients is very exciting”. “It is likely that the treatment will be used initially in very specific situations, such as helping patients who are severely obese. It differs from current treatments used for diabetes, as it has stronger appetite regulating effects but no greater effect on glucose control.” In 2014 more than 1.9 billion adults worldwide were classed as obese by the World Health Organisation; in the UK numbers have more than tripled since 1980. This Obesity can lead to other serious health-related illnesses including type 2 diabetes, hypertension and obstructive sleep apnoea as well as increasing the risk for many common cancers. The drug has been approved in the European Union, but has not yet launched in the UK. Professor Wilding added: “Consultancy like this can help relationship and reputation building and informs my research keeping it at the forefront of developments. It also brings many other benefits such as publications and income generation, which can help support other research, for example by such as funding for pilot projects that can lead to grant applications and investigator-initiated trials funded by the company”.

 

Evidence of How Incurable Cancer Develops

http://www.technologynetworks.com/Metabolomics/news.aspx?ID=184346

Researchers in the West Midlands have made a breakthrough in explaining how an incurable type of blood cancer develops from an often symptomless prior blood disorder.

The findings could lead to more effective treatments and ways to identify those most at risk of developing the cancer. All patients diagnosed with myeloma, a cancer of the blood-producing bone marrow, first develop a relatively benign condition called ‘monoclonal gammopathy of undetermined significance’ or ‘MGUS’. MGUS is fairly common in the older population and only progresses to cancer in approximately one in 100 cases. However, currently there is no way of accurately predicting which patients with MGUS are likely to go on to get myeloma. Myeloma is diagnosed in around 4,000 people each year in the UK. It specifically affects antibody-producing white blood cells found in the bone marrow, called plasma cells. The researcher team from the University of Birmingham, New Cross and Heartlands Hospitals compared the cellular chemistry of bone marrow and blood samples taken from patients with myeloma, patients with MGUS and healthy volunteers. Surprisingly, the researchers found that the metabolic activity of the bone marrow of patients with MGUS was significantly different to plasma from healthy volunteers, but there were very few differences at all between the MGUS and myeloma samples. The research was funded by the blood cancer charity Bloodwise, which changed its name from Leukaemia & Lymphoma in September.

The findings suggest that the biggest metabolic changes occur with the development of the symptomless condition MGUS and not with the later progression to myeloma.

Dr Daniel Tennant, who led the research at the University of Birmingham, said, “Our findings show that very few changes are required for a MGUS patient to progress to myeloma as we now know virtually all patients with myeloma evolve from MGUS. A drug that interferes with these specific initial metabolic changes could make a very effective treatment for myeloma, so this is a very exciting discovery.”

The research team found over 200 products of metabolism differed between the healthy volunteers and patients with MGUS or myeloma, compared to just 26 differences between MGUS patients and myeloma patients. The researchers believe that these small changes could drive the key shifts in the bone marrow required to support myeloma growth.