Polymeric nanoreactors for intracellular reactive oxygen species production and mimicking cellular environment

Medicine is always searching for new ways to improve patients’ conditions. The use of nanotechnology in medicine has recently opened a new field called “nanomedicine” which mainly aims to open new perspective of treatments and increasing therapeutic efficacy of existing therapies. In the past years nanomedicine has gain attention all over the world and developed new approaches for medical treatments, as solubilization and targeting of cancer medicine or diagnostical tools. Different journals as “Nanomedicine – Nanotechnology, Biology and Medicine,” “International Journal of Nanomedicine” or “Nanomedicine” exclusively publish articles related with nanomedical topics, while other journals have subchapters dealing with the topic and development of nanomedicine.
Nanomedicine generally describes the implementation and development of nanotechnology for medical applications. It has a broad range of use, starting from solubilization of specific drug substances, to targeted-delivery systems in a body into a specific tissue or nanoelectronical sensors which are able to detect even the smallest quantities of desired molecules. Nanomedicine aims to support and improve medicine by using properties of nanomaterials in order to diagnose or treat diseases at a molecular level. Especially in cancer therapy nanomedicine has generated a lot of aspiration and visibility. Nanomedicine for cancer therapy for example can improve the transport of a pharmaceutical active substances into the desired tissue, while decreasing the drug substances accumulation in non-target-tissue, additionally drug substances can be protected from degradation and cellular uptake is also facilitated. Materials used for nanomedical approaches rang from natural lipids to modified proteins, antibodies or synthetic polymers. These materials are used to increase the efficacy of various treatments and therefore serve the patients well-being.
To understand therapeutics activities on a nanoscale level and to use nanoscale objects for improving current therapies we focused in this thesis on two different approaches:
i.) Encapsulation of a photoactive molecule in a polymersome to investigate its ability to be used in cancer therapy.
ii.) Encapsulation of an enzyme in a polymersome to study its activity under different crowding condition to mimic a cellular like environment.