Journal of Nanomedicine & Biotherapeutic Discovery
Open Access

Abstract

Modulating the Glucose Transport by Engineering Gold Nanoparticles

Sanjib Bhattacharyya, Krishna Kattel and Franklin Kim

Gold Nanoparticles (GNP) have been widely used as a delivery vehicle for the targeted release of the drugs, vaccine and therapeutics. Literature evidence indicates that besides acting as a carrier, gold nanoparticles can alter the uptake mechanism of a targeting agent to the cancer cell. Therefore, designing a carrier plays a critical role to modulate various internalization pathways of a cargo. Given the role of malfunctioning reporter in various Mendelian diseases, it will be important to come up with a synthetic bio-mimetic transporter that can optimize the transport deficit. Glucose transport is impaired in hyperglycemia and glucose possibly faces identity crisis to enter into the cell. Using GNP for transport management of various metabolites is emerging. We have reported a design, synthesis and in vitro demonstration of an artificial Nano Glucose Transporter (NGT) to capture extracellular glucose and carry them to the cell when added exogenously, independent of endogenous cellular transporter pathways. This strategy could be extended for future application to the transport problems where extracellular biologic and metabolite burdens could be potential threat to the physiology.