한빛사논문
Jeong-Won Choi 1#, Minwook Seo 1#, Kyunghwan Kim 2, A-Ru Kim 3, Hakmin Lee 3, Hyung-Seok Kim 4, Chun Gwon Park 5,6, Seung Woo Cho 1, Joo H Kang 1, Jinmyoung Joo 1, Tae-Eun Park 1
1Department of Biomedical Engineering, College of Information and Biotechnology, Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST), Ulsan, Republic of Korea 44919.
2Department of Chemistry, College of Natural Sciences, Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST), Ulsan, Republic of Korea 44919.
3Nexmos, Inc., Yongin-si, Gyeonggi-do, Republic of Korea 16827.
4Department of Forensic Medicine, Chonnam National University, Gwangju, Republic of Korea 61186.
5Department of Biomedical Engineering, SKKU Institute for Convergence, Sungkyunkwan University (SKKU), Suwon, Gyeonggi, Republic of Korea 16419.
6Department of Intelligent Precision Healthcare Convergence, SKKU Institute for Convergence, Sungkyunkwan University (SKKU), Suwon, Gyeonggi, Republic of Korea 16419.
#These authors contributed to this work equally.
*Corresponding Authors : Jinmyoung Joo, Tae-Eun Park
Abstract
Blood-brain barrier (BBB) remains one of the critical challenges in developing neurological therapeutics. Short single-stranded DNA/RNA nucleotides forming a three-dimensional structure, called aptamers, have received increasing attention as BBB shuttles for efficient brain drug delivery owing to their practical advantages over Trojan horse antibodies or peptides. Aptamers are typically obtained by combinatorial chemical technology, termed Systemic Evolution of Ligands by EXponential Enrichment (SELEX), against purified targets, living cells, or animal models. However, identifying reliable BBB-penetrating aptamers that perform efficiently under human physiological conditions has been challenging because of the poor physiological relevance in the conventional SELEX process. Here, we report a human BBB shuttle aptamer (hBS) identified using a human microphysiological system (MPS)-based SELEX (MPS-SELEX) method. A two-channel MPS lined with human brain microvascular endothelial cells (BMECs) interfaced with astrocytes and pericytes, recapitulating high-level barrier function of in vivo BBB, was exploited as a screening platform. The MPS-SELEX procedure enabled robust function-based screening of the hBS candidates, which was not achievable in traditional in vitro BBB models. The identified aptamer (hBS01) through five-round of MPS-SELEX exhibited high capability to transport protein cargoes across the human BBB via clathrin-mediated endocytosis and enhanced uptake efficiency in BMECs and brain cells. The enhanced targeting specificity of hBS01 was further validated both in vitro and in vivo, confirming its powerful brain accumulation efficiency. These findings demonstrate that MPS-SELEX has potential in the discovery of aptamers with high target specificity that can be widely utilized to boost the development of drug delivery strategies.
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