(691c) Developing Hyper-Elastic Liposomes for Enhanced Drug Delivery: Insights from Molecular Simulations

Liposomes typically have an aqueous core encapsulated within a lipid bilayer, and are commonly used in delivery of drugs that have low stability or high cytotoxicity. While properties such as liposome size, shape and surface charge and their effects on drug delivery applications have been widely studied, liposome elasticity remains significantly underexplored. Results from a recent study [1] indicate that hyper-elastic liposomes made of DOPC (1,2-dioleoyl-sn-glycero-3-phosphocholine) accumulated significantly more in tumors compared to more rigid counterparts. In this work, we present classical molecular dynamics (MD) simulation results of the mechanical properties of several model lipid bilayer systems relevant to the development of novel hyper-elastic liposomes for drug delivery applications. Properties such as area compressibility modulus, area per lipid, bilayer thickness, lipid order parameters and lateral diffusion coefficients will be analyzed and discussed, with the long term goal of fundamentally understanding structure-property relations in our liposome systems.

[1] P. Guo, D. Liu, K. Subramanyam, B. Wang, J. Yang, J. Huang, D. T. Auguste and M. A. Moses, “Nanoparticle elasticity directs tumor uptake”, Nature Communications 2018, 9, 130.