Science1 publisher3 min readPublished
Northwestern makes brain-barrier crossing a design rule: shorten the lipid tail
An ACS Nano study varied only the lipid tail on peptide amphiphiles and found the most cohesive nanostructures got stuck inside brain endothelial cells while looser ones crossed in vitro.
The Scientist · Science desk
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What happened
- A new Northwestern Medicine study, published in ACS Nano, examined how subtle changes in the structure of peptide amphiphiles affect their ability to move through brain endothelial cells and traverse the blood-brain barrier.
- Samuel Stupp, Board of Trustees Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, Chemistry, Medicine and Biomedical Engineering and director of the Center for Regenerative Nanomedicine, was senior author of the study.
- The blood-brain barrier protects the central nervous system by controlling which substances enter brain tissue from the bloodstream, and it also blocks the vast majority of drugs from reaching their intended targets in the brain.
- The team studied peptide amphiphiles that shared the same peptide sequence but had different lipid tail lengths; varying the tails changed the cohesion of the supramolecular therapies while keeping the peptide sequences unchanged.
- Structures with longer lipid tails formed more stable, tightly bound nanostructures that accumulated inside brain endothelial cells but tended to remain trapped there.
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Why it matters
A Northwestern Medicine group reports in ACS Nano that changing the lipid tail length of a peptide amphiphile, and nothing else, determines whether the resulting nanostructure crosses a model blood-brain barrier or lodges inside the cells that form it [1][2]. For anyone assembling a central nervous system pipeline, that moves one of the field's more expensive guessing games onto a specification sheet.
The barrier controls what enters brain tissue from the bloodstream, and in doing so blocks the vast majority of drugs from reaching targets in the brain [3]. The experiment was built to isolate a single variable: the team used peptide amphiphiles sharing an identical peptide sequence but carrying lipid tails of different lengths, so that cohesion of the assembly changed while the sequence did not [4]. Longer tails produced more stable, tightly bound nanostructures that accumulated inside brain endothelial cells and tended to stay trapped there [5]. Shorter tails produced structures that crossed cell layers in an in vitro model of the barrier [6]. The useful part is the dissociation: uptake and transit moved in opposite directions across the series, so intracellular accumulation is not a proxy for delivery [7].
The proposed mechanism is temporary disassembly. The study reports evidence that the structures come apart during transport and reassemble after crossing, which would let a nanostructure arrive with its function intact [8]. Stupp described assemblies entering the cell intact, distributing into compartments and particularly the lysosome, after which the molecules "start swimming within the cell, not as an assembly, but more as individual molecules or very small aggregates of molecules" [9]. On exit, he said, "they are not an assembly, but once they're out, they find each other and reassemble at their targets" [10]. According to Stupp, the results point to a required balance between stability and the dynamic adaptability needed to reach a target: too cohesive and the material is stuck in endothelium, less cohesive and it can break apart and keep moving [11].
Context matters for how much weight this carries. Stupp's laboratory previously showed a supramolecular therapeutic reaching the brain in an animal model of stroke; the new work was designed to explain the mechanism and the structural features behind that transport [12][13]. The findings are framed as a roadmap toward treatments for stroke, Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease and other neurological conditions, which is a statement of intent rather than of efficacy [14]. Stupp calls the platform "a completely new modality," noting that a supramolecular therapeutic may contain thousands of molecules organised into a nanoscale structure, unlike a conventional small molecule [15][16]. He also suggested that understanding the disassembly and reassembly step could open intravenous, intranasal and potentially oral administration [17].
Two limits are worth holding onto. The crossing result is from an in vitro barrier model, not an in vivo measurement in this study [6], and the published account describes direction rather than magnitude: which tails work, not what fraction of dose arrives [5][6]. Lysosomal delivery is also the standard route to degradation, and the account describes escape qualitatively [9].