Nanomedicine for Treatment of Acute Lung Injury and Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome

Sadikot, Ruxana T.; Kolanjiyil, Arun V.; Kleinstreuer, Clement; Rubinstein, Israel

To begin to address the potential of nanotechnology for treatment of ARDS, we developed novel long-acting biocompatible and biodegradable phospholipid micelles (size: ∼15 nm) to modulate key signaling molecules that are critical to the inflammatory response in ALI and ARDS [2, 4, 21] . We selected molecules that initiate and propagate the inflammatory response by distinct mechanisms so that multiple pathways can be targeted either singly or by a combinatorial approach as in diseases like HIV [28] . Amongst these, TREM1 [23, 24, [29] [30] [31] [32] [33] [34] , reactive oxygen species, and Hsp90 and GLP-1, a pleiotropic potent anti-inflammatory peptide, were initially selected to modulate the inflammatory response in the lung [4, 7, 8, 17, 18] .