(575h) Engineering Polymeric Nanoparticles to Probe Innate Immunity

Inflammasome activation is one of the central mediators of a variety of chronic and acute inflammatory diseases like Colitis, Non-Alcoholic Steatohepatitis, Alzheimer’s disease, etc. This innate immune response involves the activation of the caspase-1 enzyme responsible for cleaving inactive inflammatory cytokines and other downstream proteins to their respective active forms that eventually lead to pyroptosis and enhanced immune response. Several nanoparticles have been shown to activate inflammasomes, but what nanoparticle properties result in inflammasome activation is poorly understood. This talk will focus on our recent work on evaluating the effect of polymeric nanoparticles with different surface and core properties on inflammasome activation in innate immune cells. Our work demonstrates that in addition to surface characteristics, the core properties of the nanoparticles also play an important role in interacting with innate immune cells resulting in the activation of inflammasomes.