(225e) Biology-Inspired Trojan Horse Strategies for Drug Delivery and Immunomodulation

Delivering therapeutics to target sites while avoiding off-target accumulation has been the key in designing next generation therapies with desired efficacy and acceptable toxicity. Drug delivery has nevertheless remained a challenge due to the presence of various biological barriers preventing therapeutics from reaching their target sites. To address these challenges, a plethora of drug delivery systems including nanocarrier systems have been widely explored to improve the biological efficacy of respective therapeutics. However, majority of nanocarriers have so far failed to show desired accumulation in target sites, attributed to key hurdles such as poor circulation and the inability to negotiate with other significant biological barriers. Inspired by nature, intrinsic biology has provided many successful solutions to naturally overcome biological barriers, such as circulatory cells, which uniquely tackle hurdles faced by synthetic delivery systems. With this in mind, we have explored biology-inspired Trojan Horse strategies (“cellular hitchhiking”) for directing therapeutics to their target sites. In this talk, I will discuss the principles underlying “cellular hitchhiking” and our ongoing efforts in leveraging this concept to address fundamental delivery challenges in cancer chemotherapy, cancer immunotherapy and immunomodulation. This biology-inspired concept represents a unique approach to solve critical problems at the interface of biology, materials, and medicine.