Lipid Bilayer - Commercial Applications

Commercial Applications

To date, the most successful commercial application of lipid bilayers has been the use of liposomes for drug delivery, especially for cancer treatment. (Note- the term “liposome” is essentially synonymous with “vesicle” except that vesicle is a general term for the structure whereas liposome only refers to artificial, not natural vesicles) The basic idea of liposomal drug delivery is that the drug is encapsulated in solution inside the liposome then injected into the patient. These drug-loaded liposomes travel through the system until they bind at the target site and rupture, releasing the drug. In theory, liposomes should make an ideal drug delivery system since they can isolate nearly any hydrophilic drug, can be grafted with molecules to target specific tissues and can be relatively non-toxic since the body possesses biochemical pathways for degrading lipids.

The first generation of drug delivery liposomes had a simple lipid composition and suffered from several limitations. Circulation in the bloodstream was extremely limited due to both renal clearing and phagocytosis. Refinement of the lipid composition to tune fluidity, surface charge density and surface hydration resulted in vesicles that adsorb fewer proteins from serum and thus are less readily recognized by the immune system. The most significant advance in this area was the grafting of polyethylene glycol (PEG) onto the liposome surface to produce “stealth” vesicles which circulate over long times without immune or renal clearing.

The first stealth liposomes were passively targeted at tumor tissues. Because tumors induce rapid and uncontrolled angiogenesis they are especially “leaky” and allow liposomes to exit the bloodstream at a much higher rate than normal tissue would. More recently work has been undertaken to graft antibodies or other molecular markers onto the liposome surface in the hope of actively binding them to a specific cell or tissue type. Some examples of this approach are already in clinical trials.

Another potential application of lipid bilayers is the field of biosensors. Since the lipid bilayer is the barrier between the interior and exterior of the cell it is also the site of extensive signal transduction. Researchers over the years have tried to harness this potential to develop a bilayer-based device for clinical diagnosis or bioterrorism detection. Progress has been slow in this area and, although a few companies have developed automated lipid-based detection systems, they are still targeted at the research community. These include Biacore Life Sciences, which offers a disposable chip for utilizing lipid bilayers in studies of binding kinetics and Nanion Inc which has developed an automated patch clamping system. Other, more exotic applications are also being pursued such as the use of lipid bilayer membrane pores for DNA sequencing by Oxford Nanolabs. To date, this technology has not proven commercially viable.

A supported lipid bilayer (SLB) as described above has achieved commercial success as a screening technique to measure the permeability of drugs. This parallel artificial membrane permeability assay PAMPA technique measures the permeability across specifically formulated lipid cocktail(s) found to be highly correlated with Caco-2 cultures, the gastrointestinal tract, blood–brain barrier and skin.