Nano-drugs based on nano sterically stabilized liposomes for the treatment of inflammatory neurodegenerative diseases

Keren Turjeman, Yaelle Bavli, Pablo Kizelsztein, Yaelle Schilt, Nahum Allon, Tamar Blumenfeld Katzir, Efrat Sasson, Uri Raviv, Haim Ovadia, Yechezkel Barenholz

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56 Scopus citations

Abstract

The present study shows the advantages of liposome-based nano-drugs as a novel strategy of delivering active pharmaceutical ingredients for treatment of neurodegenerative diseases that involve neuroinflammation. We used the most common animal model for multiple sclerosis (MS), mice experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis (EAE). The main challenges to overcome are the drugs' unfavorable pharmacokinetics and biodistribution, which result in inadequate therapeutic efficacy and in drug toxicity (due to high and repeated dosage). We designed two different liposomal nano-drugs, i.e., nano sterically stabilized liposomes (NSSL), remote loaded with: (a) a "water-soluble" amphipathic weak acid glucocorticosteroid prodrug, methylprednisolone hemisuccinate (MPS) or (b) the amphipathic weak base nitroxide, Tempamine (TMN). For the NSSL-MPS we also compared the effect of passive targeting alone and of active targeting based on short peptide fragments of ApoE or of β-amyloid. Our results clearly show that for NSSL-MPS, active targeting is not superior to passive targeting. For the NSSL-MPS and the NSSL-TMN it was demonstrated that these nano-drugs ameliorate the clinical signs and the pathology of EAE. We have further investigated the MPS nano-drug's therapeutic efficacy and its mechanism of action in both the acute and the adoptive transfer EAE models, as well as optimizing the perfomance of the TMN nano-drug. The highly efficacious anti-inflammatory therapeutic feature of these two nano-drugs meets the criteria of disease-modifying drugs and supports further development and evaluation of these nano-drugs as potential therapeutic agents for diseases with an inflammatory component.

Original languageEnglish
Article numbere0130442
JournalPLoS ONE
Volume10
Issue number7
DOIs
StatePublished - 6 Jul 2015

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2015 Turjeman et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

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