Red blood cell-hitchhiking mediated pulmonary delivery of ivermectin: Effects of nanoparticle properties
Jinpeng Zheng, Caihong Lu, Yaning Ding, Jinbang Zhang, Fangyun Tan, Jingzhou Liu, Guobao Yang, Yuli Wang, Zhiping Li, Meiyan Yang, Yang Yang, Wei Gong, Chunsheng Gao
International Journal of Pharmaceutics, doi:10.1016/j.ijpharm.2022.121719
Recent studies have demonstrated that ivermectin (IVM) exhibits antiviral activity against severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the causative virus of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). However, the repurposing of IVM for the treatment of COVID-19 has presented challenges primarily due to the low IVM plasma concentration after oral administration, which was well below IC 50 . Here, a red blood cell (RBC)-hitchhiking strategy was used for the targeted delivery of IVM-loaded nanoparticles (NPs) to the lung. IVM-loaded poly (lactic-co-glycolic acid) (PLGA) NPs (IVM-PNPs) and chitosan-coating IVM-PNPs (IVM-CSPNPs) were prepared and adsorbed onto RBCs. Both RBC-hitchhiked IVM-PNPs and IVM-CSPNPs could significantly enhance IVM delivery to lungs, improve IVM accumulation in lung tissue, inhibit the inflammatory responses and finally significantly alleviate the progression of acute lung injury. Specifically, the redistribution and circulation effects were related to the properties of NPs. RBC-hitchhiked cationic IVM-CSPNPs showed a longer circulation time, slower accumulation and elimination rates, and higher anti-inflammatory activities than RBC-hitchhiked anionic IVM-PNPs. Therefore, RBC-hitchhiking provides an alternative strategy to improve IVM pharmacokinetics and bioavailability for repurposing of IVM to treat COVID-19. Furthermore, according to different redistribution effects of different NPs, RBC-hitchhiked NPs may achieve various accumulation rates and circulation times for different requirements of drug delivery.
Ethics approval and consent to participate. All procedures involving the care and handling of animals carried out with the approval of the Animal Care and Use Ethics Committee of the Beijing Institute of Pharmacology and Toxicology (Beijing, China) . This committee also approved all animal-related experiments in the current study (No. IACUC-DWZX-2020-646) . Consent for publication. All authors agreed to submit this manuscript.
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Declaration of Competing Interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
Appendix A. Supplementary material Supplementary data to this article can be found online at https://doi. org/10.1016/j.ijpharm.2022.121719.
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