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Synthesis of a Smart Gold Nano‐vehicle for Liver Specific Drug Delivery

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Abstract

Targeting drug formulations to specific tissues and releasing the bioactive content in response to a certain stimuli remains a significant challenge in the field of biomedical science. We have developed a nanovehicle that can be used to deliver “drugs” to “specific” tissues. For this, we have simultaneously modified the surface of the nanovehicle with “drugs” and “tissue-specific ligands”. The “tissue-specific ligands” will target the nanovehicle to the correct tissue and release the “drug” of interest in response to specific stimuli. We have synthesised a “lactose surface-modified gold nanovehicle” to target liver cells and release the model fluorescent drug (coumarin derivative) in response to the differential glutathione concentration (between blood plasma and liver cells). Lactose is used as the liver-specific targeting ligand given the abundance of l-galactose receptors in hepatic cells. The coumarin derivative is used as a fluorescent tag as well as a linker for the attachment of various biologically relevant molecules. The model delivery system is compatible with a host of different ligands and hence could be used to target other tissues as well in future. The synthesised nanovehicle was found to be non-toxic to cultured human cell lines even at elevated non-physiological concentrations as high as 100 μg/mL. We discover that the synthesised gold-based nanovehicle shows considerable stability at low extracellular glutathione concentrations; however coumarin is selectively released at high hepatic glutathione concentration.

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Acknowledgments

The authors thank the Department of Science and Technology for the financial assistance in the form of Junior Research Fellowship and the University Science Instrumentation Centre, University of Delhi, for providing the characterization facilities.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Chemistry, University of Delhi, Delhi, 110007, India

    Seema Garg, Tanusri Nandi & Subho Mozumdar

  2. Department of Microbiology and Immunology, Columbia University Medical Centre, New York, New York, 10032, USA

    Seema Garg & Arnab De

Authors
  1. Seema Garg
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  2. Arnab De
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  3. Tanusri Nandi
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  4. Subho Mozumdar
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Subho Mozumdar.

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Garg, S., De, A., Nandi, T. et al. Synthesis of a Smart Gold Nano‐vehicle for Liver Specific Drug Delivery. AAPS PharmSciTech 14, 1219–1226 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1208/s12249-013-9999-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1208/s12249-013-9999-0

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