ERC grant to develop tiny biodegradable medicine factories
A €2m ERC Consolidator Grant has been awarded to Associate Professor of Chemistry Alexander Zelikin of Aarhus University, Denmark. He has developed a new method to build tiny degradable ‘medicine factories’ inside the body.
The tiny factories consist of hydrogel, a mixture of water and polymers and characteristics similar to gelatine. In this case they must simultaneously be able to function as material for the small factories and contain the enzymes needed to produce medicine while the raw material is arriving at the factories.
There is nothing new in allowing enzymes to be in charge of the medical production – plenty of drugs are made of inactive substances which are not converted into active drugs until the liver or enzymes elsewhere in the body begins to break them down. They are called prodrugs.
Zelikin explained: “The problem with this type of prodrug is, however, that after the conversion they are typically sent into the blood in the entire body, so that only a fraction reaches the place which hurts. This problem can be solved in the process by creating prodrugs, which can only be transformed by specific enzymes and then placing these enzymes in the particular part of the body which needs the drugs.”
He will spend the ERC grant on developing two types of biodegradable factories. One is a new kind of stent – a term for the small metal meshes inserted into patients suffering from blockage of their coronary artery to keep it open after an angioplasty. Zelikin’s stents will be made of hydrogel instead of metal because their primary purpose is not to keep a vein open, but to deliver medicine. The doctor will inject a prodrug into the patient’s vein, after which the enzymes in the stent convert it to, for example, a medicine against arteriosclerosis.
The second sort will consist of small particles, which can initially be used for the treatment of diseases such as cancer. The particles must be able to submit both medicine and, for example, contrast agents so that they can be used simultaneously for treatment and diagnosis.
