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Modified Red Blood Cells Essay

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As a potential tool to optimize the delivery of therapeutics via the cardiovascular system, researchers are looking to erythrocytes as an abundant and versatile drug delivery platform. There seems to be a consensus in the biomedical community that modified red blood cells (RBCs) have great potential to add to the safety, effectiveness, and specificity of therapeutics and other interventions. RBCs have already been shown to interact with more than fifty known drugs that have been approved by the FDA, and may be unintentionally serving as a natural compartment that affects; biodistribution, metabolism, and the pharmacokinetics of many commonly prescribed medications. As seen in figure 1, RBCs are enucleated, biconcave discs that are …show more content…

A major downside to this method is a lack of therapeutic isolation from the body which makes this approach a poor choice for targeted delivery. Another complication with this method is that the coupled therapeutic might cause an unintended immune response. The major benefit associated with coupling therapeutics to the surface of RBCs is that it is possible to perform the procedure in the patient’s cardiovascular system. Once injected, the therapeutics with conjugated RBC targeting ligands will form covalent chemical cross linkers with a receptor on the extracellular surface of the RBC. In doing so, the trouble of having to extract RBCs, treat them, and ultimately reintroduce them back into the patient’s cardiovascular system is avoided. Also, by coupling the therapeutics to the RBCs membrane, this approach avoids the damage that can occur during the encapsulation method which will be discussed next. (Muzykantov)
The alternative method of loading RBCs, involves encapsulating the therapeutics inside the cell. While there are multiple methods for coaxing the cell to uptake a therapeutic, there appears to be a consensus that osmosis driven entrapment is the method that does the least amount of damage to the cell membrane. This method takes advantage of an interesting biochemical feature of red blood cells and can be viewed in figure 2. When RBCs are put in a hypotonic solution

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