Engineering nanoparticles for protein therapeutics - quantifying membrane access and loading

The self-assembly properties of lipid systems can be exploited to form lipid membranes with complex morphologies. These include membranes with a lattice-type internal structure and interwoven but not connected water channels. They can be dispersed in the presence of a stabiliser to form uniform nanoparticles termed cubosomes. Loading of these nanoparticles with proteins will enable their application as therapeutic agents. Two significant bottlenecks in this process are 1) to understand how the stabiliser limits access to the internal lipid membrane and 2) characterisation of the structural effects of loading charged molecules into the nanoparticles. The key objectives of this investigation are to characterise the structural effects of loading cubosomes with charged molecules of varying molecular weights as a function of the amount and type of stabiliser used when forming them.