UNIVERSITY of CALIFORNIA, SANTA BARBARA

Brief Description

An extremely versatile drug delivery system composed by a lipid-bilayer vesicle.

Background

Vesicles of lipid bilayers are useful structures for drug delivery. The permeation rate, membrane charge, specific recognition particles, steric stabilizers, membrane rigidity, and phase transition temperatures all play a role in optimization of vesicles for particular delivery applications. Currently, vesicle design is restricted by conflicts among these properties, forcing trade-offs in the design of vesicle delivery systems.

Description

Researchers at the University of California have constructed vesosomes by aggregating lipid-bilayer vesicles using biotin-streptavidin complexation and then encapsulating these aggregates in a larger lipid bilayer using the same molecular-recognition technique. These multi-compartment vesosomes offer a versatile means for designing delivery systems because they can distribute often incompatible attributes among the various membranes. Interior vesicle sizes range from 20-500 nm and vesosome sizes range from about 0.1 micron to greater than 1.0 micron. Details of preparation and sample images of the resulting vesosomes are presented in Nature (1997), vol. 387, p. 61.

Advantages

The vesosome's multi-vesicle and self-assembly properties permit:

• Division of incompatible membrane properties among the various membranes, allowing the possibility for sophisticated drug-delivery schemes;
• Optimization of bilayer composition and aggregate size at each step of the self-assembly process.

Applications

By optimizing both interior and exterior bilayer compositions, the size and size distribution of the interior vesicles, the overall size of the vesosome, the nature of the attachments of the vesicles, and the type of additives to the outer bilayer (such as polymers or specific recognition sites), an extremely versatile drug delivery system can be developed for a variety of applications. For example, one possibility is to deliver toxic drugs directly to cancer cells using cancer-specific recognition molecules on the vesosome surface.

The technology is available for licensing.

Related Materials

• Studying the In Vivo Behavior of the Vesosome - 02/10/2009

Patent Status

Country	Type	Number	Dated	Case
United States Of America	Issued Patent	6,565,889	05/20/2003	1997-024
United States Of America	Issued Patent	6,221,401	04/24/2001	1997-024

Inventors

• Coldren, Bret
• Kennedy, Michael T.
• Kisak, Edward
• Walker, Scott A.
• Zasadzinski, Joseph A.

Other Information

Contact

Franco Caporale / caporale@tia.ucsb.edu / tel: View Phone Number. Please reference Tech ID #19353.

ADDITIONAL TECHNOLOGIES BY THESE INVENTORS

• Safe And Potent Synthetic Lung Surfactant For Treating Rds And Acute Asthma
• Remotely Triggered Liposomal Drug Release