Abstract
In the last decades, the staggering progress in nanotechnology brought around a wide and heterogeneous range of nanoparticle-based platforms for the diagnosis and treatment of many diseases. Most of these systems are designed to be administered intravenously. This administration route allows the nanoparticles (NPs) to widely distribute in the body and reach deep organs without invasive techniques. When these nanovectors encounter the biological environment of systemic circulation, a dynamic interplay occurs between the circulating proteins and the NPs, themselves. The set of proteins that bind to the NP surface is referred to as the protein corona (PC). PC has a critical role in making the particles easily recognized by the innate immune system, causing their quick clearance by phagocytic cells located in organs such as the lungs, liver, and spleen. For the same reason, PC defines the immunogenicity of NPs by priming the immune response to them and, ultimately, their immunological toxicity. Furthermore, the protein corona can cause the physical destabilization and agglomeration of particles. These problems induced to consider the PC only as a biological barrier to overcome in order to achieve efficient NP-based targeting. This review will discuss the latest advances in the characterization of PC, development of stealthy NP formulations, as well as the manipulation and employment of PC as an alternative resource for prolonging NP half-life, as well as its use in diagnostic applications.
Highlights
Nanotechnology for years held the promise of radically improving detection and treatment of many different diseases
The results showed that protein accessibility to the NP surface was a major contributor to complement activation, especially through the classical pathway
Another study by Xu et al (2016) generated artificial viral NPs (AVNs) composed of a core of gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) coated with a phospholipid bilayer modified with the ganglioside GM3 as an active targeting moiety for CD169 normally expressed by APCs
Summary
Nanotechnology for years held the promise of radically improving detection and treatment of many different diseases. The composition of PC is highly variable and depends on many factors including size, material, and surface charge of NPs. The assembly of this protein coating bestows NPs with a new biological identity that determines their colloidal stability, biodistribution, interactions, toxicity, and clearance (Figure 1).
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