Noriyuki Uchida

Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, Japan

Title: Design of Phospholipid Self-assembly for Drug Delivery System to Skin Tissue

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Biography

Noriyuki Uchida is currently working on development of phospholipid-based functional materials at Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology.  He received his PhD from the University of Tokyo under Prof. Aida. After that he worked at RIKEN.  He joined Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology as an assistant professor in 2020.  His research interest is design of functional materials based on self-assembly of biomolecules such as phospholipids and proteins, and their application to biomaterials.  He has received several awards including the Prize of the Japan Association for Chemical Innovation.

Abstract

Bicelles are lipid–surfactant assemblies in which lipid bilayer fragments are edge-stabilized by certain surfactants.  Because bicelles adopt morphologies that are intermediate between those of lipid vesicles and lipid–surfactant mixed micelles, they form a new class of phospholipid-based materials.  So far, bicelles have been applied to NMR alignment media and drug delivery carriers.  However, applications of conventional bicelles have been limited owing to insufficient stability toward temperature, concentration, pH, etc.

We have developed a series of sodium cholate (SC)-based surfactants allowing for the preparations of kinetically and thermally stable bicelles in view of applications to membrane models or drug delivery carriers.  First of all, we synthesized SC modified with three triethylene glycol chains endcapped with polymerizable units (SC-M) and prepared bicelles by mixing SC-M with DMPC lipid.  After crosslinking of SC-M, the bicelle became kinetically and thermally stable.1  We next utilized SC endcapped with butoxy groups (SC-OC4) instead of SC-M.  As a result, we could prepared thermally stable SC-OC4/DMPC bicelles without the complicated polymerization process. Recently, we successfully prepared a bicelle with kinetic stability, dilution tolerance and size tunability by mixing SC endcapped with hexyl chains (SC-C5) and DPPC lipid with a bilayer melting point higher than room temperature.  Because the features of the SC-C5/DPPC bicelle are desirable for drug delivery carriers, we utilized SC-C5/DPPC bicelle for a drug delivery application.