Project description
Advancing aerosol therapeutics delivery to the lung
Extracellular vesicles (EVs) are membrane-enclosed structures actively secreted by cells as a means of intercellular communication in various biological processes. EVs have attracted great interest thanks to the therapeutic potential of their nucleic acid and protein cargo. The EU-funded INSPIRE project is exploiting EVs as delivery vehicles for transfer to the lung. To date, pulmonary gene therapy has been hampered by the inability of various nucleic acid vectors to penetrate the lung mucus and effectively reach lung cells. INSPIRE will employ an aerosol-based approach to efficiently deliver genetically modified EVs from mesenchymal stromal cells through the mucus barrier, as a therapy against lung cancer.
Objective
Lung cancer (LC) treatments have advanced in recent years with the advent of genetic profiling and immunotherapy. However, LC is a complex heterogeneous disease and survival rates remain poor. RNA (mRNA, microRNA, other non-coding RNAs and nucleic acid based modulators of same) and gene therapies (DNA or gene editing) for delivering nucleic acid-based therapeutics have curative potential for a host of indications previously untreatable. They have yet to enter the mainstream, due to safety concerns and difficulties delivering them efficiently to areas other than the liver, kidney and circulatory system. Aerosol delivery allows direct targeting of lung tissues but viscous mucus in the lung is a significant barrier to gene transfer to the target cells of the lungs. Even if the mucus layer can be penetrated, inefficient penetration through the cell membrane further impedes access of these vectors to the underlying target cells, thus preventing successful gene transfer.
Delivery is a major barrier to successful pulmonary gene therapy for competing viral and non-viral gene transfer vectors and the vast promise of gene therapy has many challenges to overcome. OMNI's novel solution is pioneering the use of genetically modified MSC EVs with a proprietary surface engineering technology to further enhance delivery through the mucus barrier and into the targeted lung cells. This platform technology also combines efficient aerosol delivery of the EVs via AERO's proprietary state of the art vibrating mesh nebulizer technology. This unique solution solves the problems associated with lung targeted delivery of RNA based advanced therapies.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesgeneticsDNA
- medical and health sciencesclinical medicineoncology
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesgeneticsRNA
- medical and health sciencesbasic medicineimmunologyimmunotherapy
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HORIZON-RIA - HORIZON Research and Innovation ActionsCoordinator
D08 C2F1 Dublin
Ireland