47 stories in total
Elena Kopoleva, Elena Petrova, Maria Timofeeva and Pavel Filatov won grants in a competition for undergraduate and postgraduate students at St. Petersburg universities.
Iriney Vasilev will study optical methods for measuring temperature at the nanoscale using upconversion nanoparticles in biological media.
Lidia Mikhailova gave an invited lecture at the 10th International School for Young Scientists «Nonlinear and Biomedical Photonics» in Novosibirsk.
Pavel Filatov has become head of ITMO Collab, ITMO’s competition of interdisciplinary student projects, where the best teams receive up to 1,000,000 rubles.
Members of our team have published a paper on nanoparticles carrying microRNA-200a for treating acute and chronic liver diseases.
Konstantin Arabuli, Nikolaj Zhestkij, Lidia Mikhailova and Maria Timofeeva have completed their PhD studies. Next comes the defense of their dissertations.
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About 2 million people die from liver diseases every year. Chronic diseases are often linked to fibrosis, the overgrowth of connective tissue that leads to cirrhosis and cancer. Acute damage results from poisoning and drug overdose. Existing treatments only relieve the symptoms without restoring the tissue. MicroRNAs that control genes are promising, but they are unstable and need carriers. Scientists from the Privolzhsky Research Medical University (PRMU) and ITC «Bridge» proposed nanoparticles made of biocompatible polylactide to deliver microRNA-200a, which becomes deficient in liver diseases. The approach targets both acute and chronic pathologies while stimulating the regeneration of the organ.
«Our part of the work at ITMO was to develop carriers for therapeutic RNA aimed at treating liver fibrosis and acute liver failure in rats. We synthesized polylactic acid nanoparticles and loaded them with therapeutic microRNA, and then our colleagues administered the finished complexes to laboratory animals with induced pathologies. Loading therapeutic RNA into carriers is a complex and highly responsible step. It is not enough simply to deliver the molecule into a cell: you need to keep it stable and active and make sure it ends up strictly in the cytosol. That is why we paid special attention to choosing the right loading strategy that does not damage the RNA», said Mikhail Zyuzin, leading researcher.
The effectiveness of the approach was tested on rat models of acute liver injury and progressive fibrosis. Targeted delivery of microRNA-200a with polylactide nanoparticles stopped cell death after the first injection, and in chronic disease it reversed fibrosis by two stages. The study also involved researchers from Sechenov First Moscow State Medical University, the Volga District Medical Center of the Federal Medical and Biological Agency and the Nizhny Novgorod Regional Clinical Oncology Dispensary.
