LiverPass

Offentlig prosjektsammendrag

The past century has seen the development of medications enabling treatment of more and more diseases. Yet, there are several diseases that present day therapeutics is unable to remedy. Examples of such diseases are several types of cancer, many viral infections, and genetically caused metabolic diseases. In recent years a new class of pharmaceuticals have emerged, aiming to cure these difficult-to-treat diseases. Comprising large molecule compounds (e.g. oligonucleotides that control the synthesis of certain proteins in cells, enzymes that supply lack of specific enzymes, or antibodies that carry toxic compounds to cancer cells) these new generation drugs differ from the classical ones by their higher molecular size and their modes of administration. Several of these drugs have to be administered intravenously to reach their target cells. Hence, the devlopment of these drugs includes efforts to control their delivery. Due to the very high ability of the liver to recognize and take up foreign substances from the blood circulation, a major challenge for developers of this new generation of drugs is their rapid and high capacity uptake in liver. Hence, considerable resources have been spent to circumvent the liver uptake of these compounds. This has proven to be extremely difficult. We here propose a new technology to reduce this unwanted liver uptake of large molecule compounds and nanoparticle formulations. A successful development of our innovation will contribute to remedy several diseases for which no cure exists.