Nanoparticles in blood: understanding and controlling protein corona for optimized nanomedicine – NANOBLORONA

Nanomedicine is a research area that has seen its public interest growing during the last twenty years. The possibility to use and modify physicochemical properties of nanoparticles (NPs) to target and cure any area in the body is becoming more and more encouraging.
However, there are still some problems for the further development of nanoprobes such as the control of their biological behavior. In fact, once in contact with biological fluids, especially in blood, the main access route to the organism, plasma proteins will cover randomly NPs’ surface. This protein corona will then affect the clearance, potential toxicity and targeting efficiency of NPs.
This project aims, first, to innovatively study the physicochemical parameters influencing in vivo biodistribution and blood response of injected model NPs used as medical imaging contrast agent.
For the first time, all these results will be linked to the observation of the in vivo formation of plasma protein corona on these NPs. Then, with the knowledge gain from these experiments, biomimetic NPs functionalized with selected and interesting proteins will be developed to obtain better targeting medical imaging nanoprobes with improved blood biological behaviors (less interactions and so toxicity). Blood behaviors of these new nanohybrids will also be extensively tested to bring a full understanding of their optimized biological fate.