Carriers of medicines made from human cells can treat lung infections

The scientists used human white blood cell membranes to deliver two drugs, an antibiotic and an anti-inflammatory, directly to infected lungs in mice.

The nano-sized drug delivery method developed at Washington State University successfully treated both bacterial growth and inflammation in the lungs of mice. The study, recently published in Communications biology, shows a potential new strategy for the treatment of infectious diseases, including COVID-19.

“If a doctor simply gives two drugs to a patient, they don’t go directly to the lungs. They circulate throughout the body, so there’s potentially a lot of toxicity,” said Zhenjia Wang, the study’s corresponding author and associate professor at the College. of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences of the WSU. “Instead, we can load the two types of drugs into these vesicles that specifically target lung inflammation.”

Wang and his research group have developed a method to essentially remove the membrane from neutrophils, the most common type of white blood cell that drives the body’s immune system response. Once emptied, these membranes can be used as nanovesicles, tiny empty sacks only 100 to 200 nanometers wide, which scientists can then fill with medicine.

These nanovesicles retain some of the properties of the original white blood cells, so when injected into a patient, they travel directly to the inflamed area just like the cells would normally, but these nanovesicles carry the drugs that scientists have implanted to attack the infection.

In this study, first author Jin Gao, an associate researcher at WSU, loaded the nanovesicles with an antibiotic and resolvinD1, an anti-inflammatory derived from omega-3 fatty acids, to treat lungs infected with P. aeruginosa, a potentially common pathogen. fatal that patients can catch in hospital settings. The researchers used two drugs because lung infections often create two problems, the infection itself and the inflammation created by a strong immune system response.

Before this method can be used in human patients, toxicity studies and clinical trials should be conducted, but this study provides evidence that the innovation works for lung inflammation. If the method proves safe and effective for humans, Wang said the nanovesicles could be loaded with any type of drug to treat a range of infectious diseases, including COVID-19.

“I think it is possible to translate this technology to help cure COVID-19,” Wang said. “COVID-19 is a virus, not a bacterial pathogen, but it also causes an inflammatory response in the lung, so we could load an antiviral drug like remdesivir into the nanovesicle and it would target that inflammation.”