Transport within biological systems is essential for all life on earth, whether in facilitating cellular signaling, delivering nutrients, removing waste, or aiding the immune system. Medically, these transportation pathways can be exploited to deliver drugs primarily through the circulatory system in which small organic molecules are dissolved in and carried by the blood. This passive approach to drug delivery can lead to dangerous side effects and low efficacy as drugs move throughout the body.
To overcome these limitations, modern treatments often rely on targeted drug delivery schemes in which drugs are encapsulated inside of a drug delivery vehicle — such as the lipid nanoparticles used in the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines — and released only at an effective site through specific physicochemical associations. This active approach significantly reduces negative side effects and improves drug efficacy, but it requires precise control over how the drug-laden nanoparticles move throughout the body and penetrate specific tissues of interest.
Testing nanoparticle transport properties remains prohibitively challenging for two primary reasons. First, it requires expensive,...
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