Polymeric Nanogel for Non-covalent Hydrophobic Drug Encapsulation

Abstract

Nanomedicine, the nanotechnology for development of efficient and safe medicines affects to biotechnology and chemistry during several decades.The interest in nanomedicine offers the innovation of drug delivery system using nanoparticle. The advantages of nanoparticles in the therapeutic application includes following properties. First, they can enhance the effect of medicines without displace other drug molecules for pharmacokinetic effects. Second, the specificity to the diseased cell by targeting delivery showed efficiency than chemotherapy. Third, they can across the primary barrier to the immunological response. Nowadays, the modifiable drug carrier performs multimodal delivery with the imaging agent and therapeutic reagent. They can pack diverse cargo molecules such as proteins, peptides, genes, sugar as well as a variety of chemical reagents. Especially, the targeting ability of nanoparticle system has attractive property to development. Passive targeting is one kind of focusing mechanism of nanoparticle. The nanoparticle can be accumulated in the active site in targeting site with cell population. Active targeting is the other way for targeting method of nanoparticle. The key to this method is surface modification. Conjugation with affinity ligands provides the unique binding ability with disease tissues and cells. Through past 30 years, there were quite a number of nanoparticle models developed for the therapeutic purpose. However, only a very few of nanoparticles applied in clinical development and none of them have been used for clinical purpose. The lack of understanding phenomenon inside cellular level with nanoparticle and reproduction problem for synthesis nanoparticle hampers the clinical translation. In this thesis, we treated several researches trying to solve current problems in drug delivery area. First, the study of investigating of cargo release mechanism using polymeric micelles would give us the useful solution for developing future theragnostic nanoparticle. We used well-known polymeric micelle system which includes biocompatibility and resistance to cytotoxicity. Clear understanding of a cellular pathway for release drug molecules will open the gate for clinical application. Second, we developed the natural polypeptide based supramolecular nanogels for resolve current premature release problems. The biocompatible nanoparticle including the ability regarding triggered release will give us the other possibility using natural polypeptide as the material for nanogel system. Lastly, the nanoparticle models with unique targeting ability are developed following the current trend of this research area. Their particular advantage for affinity and targeting subcellular organelles provides more efficient way for cure disease through nanoparticle systems.