Experimental Quantification of Interactions Between Drug Delivery Systems and Cells In Vitro: A Guide for Preclinical Nanomedicine Evaluation

Abstract

A major component of designing drug delivery systems concerns how to amplify or attenuate interactions with specific cell types. For instance, a chemotherapeutic might be functionalized with an antibody to enhance binding to cancer cells ("targeting") or functionalized with polyethylene glycol to help evade immune cell recognition ("stealth"). Even at a cellular level, optimizing the binding and uptake of a drug carrier is a complex biological design problem. Thus, it is valuable to separate how strongly a new carrier interacts with a cell from the functional efficacy of a carrier's cargo once delivered to that cell. To continue the chemotherapeutic example, "how well it binds to a cancer ce..