Nanoscale & Nanoscale Advances Blog

Camouflaging nanoparticles so that they are not attacked by the immune system is a major challenge in developing long-circulating, effective drug-delivery vehicles. Attaching CD47, a transmembrane protein that serves as a universal molecular ‘marker-of-self’, to the surface of nanoparticles is one way to enable active immune evasion. However, functionalising the particle surface evenly and with uniformly oriented protein is very difficult.

Liangfang Zhang et al. show that their membrane translocation approach is very effective for functionalizing nanoparticles with molecules of CD47 in their recent Nanoscale Communication. They were able to coat nanoparticles with immunomodulatory proteins at an equivalent density to those on red blood cells, and in the correct orientation.

Read this HOT article today:

‘Marker-of-self’ functionalization of nanoscale particles through a top-down cellular membrane coating approach
Che-Ming J. Hu, Ronnie H. Fang, Brian T. Luk, Kevin N. H. Chen, Cody Carpenter, Weiwei Gao, Kang Zhang and Liangfang Zhang
DOI: 10.1039/C3NR00015J