Flame-made calcium phosphate nanoparticles for biological drug delivery toward healing chronic wound

The increasing number of chronic wound cases, most frequently attributed to antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections, has set an urgent alarm since it causes low quality of life and even fatal complications to thousands of patients as well as burdens the healthcare systems globally.

Antimicrobial biological drugs, also called biologics, are proposed to address the emerging and unmet threat of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in wound infections by developing antibiotic-free treatments with low immunological risk.

Despite having maximal antimicrobial effect, biologics efficiency in infection treatment and wound healing is compromised due to their limited circulation half-life and susceptibility to environment and wound related factors.

Hybrid nanoformulations (HNs) based on inorganic nanoparticles (NPs) are developed to perform biologics delivery by securing the integrity of their vulnerable structure and efficiency while they exhibit great potential in biomedicine as drug nanocarriers due to their stability, small size, and extremely high surface area.

Here, we propose the synthesis of biocompatible and healing-promoting Calcium Phosphate (CaP) NPs with a nanomanufacturing process famous for its scalability and reproducibility, Flame Spray Pyrolysis.

The as-prepared CaP NPs will be loaded with the biologics, peptide LL-37 and enzyme Lysozyme, to form novel hybrid drug delivery nanosystems.

Synthesis parameters of CaP NPs and HNs nanomanufacturing protocols will be studied and their physicochemical characterization will be performed. The stability, the antimicrobial activity and the cytocompatibility of the HNs will be examined with in-vitro assays. Finally, the effectiveness of HNs in wound infections treatment and wound healing promotion will be tested ex-vivo.

This project will provide fundamental insights on biological drug loading parameters on nanocarriers to facilitate rapid translation to clinics, after the intellectual property is protected.