Erythrocyte-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. To achieve this, a plethora of drug delivery systems including nanocarrier systems have been widely explored to improve the biological outcomes of respective drugs. 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 several successful examples of “carriers” in the form of circulatory cells, which uniquely tackle hurdles faced by synthetic delivery systems. Of them all, erythrocytes have abilities to maintain long circulation and negotiate the most with many biological barriers. With this in mind, we have explored erythrocyte-inspired Trojan Horse strategies (“erythrocyte hitchhiking”) for directing therapeutics to their target sites. In this talk, I will discuss the principles underlying “erythrocyte hitchhiking” and our ongoing efforts in leveraging this concept to address fundamental delivery challenges in cancer chemotherapy and immunomodulation.