PEG-PLGA and mal-PEG-PLGA from PolySciTech used in the development of a bone-specific nanoparticle system for drug delivery to skeletal tissue.

Due to skeletal-tissue’s anatomical features and high mineral content, delivery of medicines to bone tissue has remained difficult to achieve. This makes treatment of bone diseases (bone cancer, rickets, osteoporosis and others) especially difficult as the majority of administered medicine is excreted without achieving therapeutic effect. Recently, researchers at University of Connecticut and University of Wisconsin-Madison used PolySciTech Mal-PEG-PLGA (PolyVivo cat# AI020) and methoxy-PEG-PLGA (PolyVivo cat# AK037) to formulate drug-delivery nanoparticles and conjugated to these aspartic acid as a targeting moiety. They found that the developed system provided for efficient targeting to bone tissue. This research holds promise for treating a wide array of bone diseases. Carbone, Erica J., Komal Rajpura, Tao Jiang, Ho-Man Kan, Xiaohua Yu, and Kevin W-H. Lo. "Osteotropic Nanoscale Drug Delivery System via a Single Aspartic Acid as the Bone-Targeting Moiety." Journal of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology 17, no. 3 (2017): 1747-1752. http://www.ingentaconnect.com/contentone/asp/jnn/2017/00000017/00000003/art00029

“Abstract: Osteotropic nanoparticle-based drug delivery systems have been investigated as potential therapies for various skeletal diseases. These delivery systems are usually formulated by functionalizing the nanoparticle surfaces with bone-targeting ligands. Antibodies, proteins or peptide sequences have shown promise as bone-targeting ligands; however, methods utilizing these targeting ligands suffer from many limitations including high production cost, protein or peptide instability, and unwanted immune response. These limitations can be minimized by using the osteotropic small molecule approach because of the stability, ease of conjugation with polymeric nanoparticles, and low cost of small molecules. We, and others, have previously demonstrated that poly-aspartic acid sequencelinked biodegradable polymeric nanoparticles can interact specifically with mineralized tissue in vitro, ex vivo, and in vivo. The hypothesis of this study is that single aspartic acid-linked nanoparticles can effectively interact with bone tissue specifically. In this study, we sought to identify the minimal aspartic acid residues stretch necessary for efficient HA binding. We further sought to design a novel osteotropic nanoparticle-based drug delivery system using a single aspartic acid small molecule as the bone-targeting moiety. Keywords: Musculoskeletal Tissue; Nanomedicine; Small Molecules; Targeted Drug Delivery; Targeting Ligands”