(239a) Engineering Endothelial Leakiness with Inorganic Nanomaterials

It is often assumed that nanomedicine and drug delivery systems rely on passive endothelial and permeability retention (EPR) effect to escape from vasculature. However, EPR effect is a side effect of a metabolic deficient tumor which may be too advanced to kill effectively and this also implies that these nano medicine are only applicable for advanced tumors and not before. Here, we showed that with nano materials, we can engineer a leaky endothelia that gives us the option to deliver nano medicine even when there was no EPR effect (Setyawati et al. Nature Comms 2023, Wang et al. Nature Nanotechnology 2024). We also uncovered that biological nanomaterials also employ a similar NanoEL concept to get over the endothelial barrier as further exploration in these engineered endothelial leakiness phenomena (Li et al. Nature Comms 2024).