Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Avoiding delivery of drugs, which are mainly natural or synthetic biomolecules, pep-
tides, proteins, etc., to unwanted regions and ensuring their delivery to right target
organs is expected to soon be made using nanoparticles, provided the technology
required for this task becomes sufficiently developed under the right scientific con-
ditions. In combination with other secondary therapeutic agents, nanoparticles can
find the correct pathways and carry drugs and other agents attached to the nanopar-
ticles to the targets of interest. Major progress has been recently made in the use
of nanoparticles/nanomaterials in biology and medicine. The interested reader can
acquire substantial knowledge on the use of nanoparticles in specific areas for distinct
purposes by consulting the various published papers in the field, e.g.,
•
Drug and gene delivery [
13
,
20
]
•
Fluorescent labels [
3
,
4
,
25
]
•
Tissue engineering [
5
,
12
]
•
Hyperthermia of tumor [
27
]
•
Radionuclide tumoral therapy [
7
]
•
Biological molecules and cells separation and purification [
18
]
•
MRI contrast enhancement [
26
]
•
Phagokinetic studies [
21
]
•
Biodetection of pathogens [
6
]
•
Protein detection [
19
]
•
DNA structure probes [
14
]
The above papers address the use of nanomaterials, not only for multiple purposes
such as imaging, therapeutic, engineering and technological, etc., but also aimed at
targeting multiple anatomical organs or their internal sections inside and outside cel-
lular environments. The most important problem to date is to find an appropriate or
near-perfect technique to deliver drugs into the cellular interior. Despite the devel-
opment of advanced technology related to this subject, a very general non-toxic way
is yet to be discovered. In this chapter, we provide some details about both scientific
and technological aspects of nanoparticle drug delivery into the cellular interiors,
using both existing ideas and some novel concepts. We address this problem using
both analytical and technological analogies applied to a specific compartment, which
is the cell membrane, to make the problemmuch simpler and understandable. We use
some supporting experimental results on drug pathways depending on the properties
of cell membranes, which determine the partition coefficients involved.
6.2 The Membrane's Selective Transport and General
Barrier Properties
As discussed in earlier chapters of this topic, a cell membrane's primary role is to
serve as a barrier against the solutes trying to diffuse across it. With the physical
presence of a membrane, the cytoplasm maintains a different composition from the
materials surrounding the cell. The membrane is very impermeable to ions and
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