Towards Microneedle Delivery of LNP-mRNA Gene Therapies for Skin Aging

The skin is arguably one of the easiest of the large organs in the body to target for delivery of gene therapies, via established microneedle approaches. Nonetheless, much of the initial thrust of gene therapy clinical development focused instead on the liver, one of the other more tractable targets. Most material injected into the bloodstream ends up in the liver, and a single injection is logistically easier than coverage of large amounts of skin via microneedle patches, among other reasons. Given the advent of messenger RNA (mRNA) encapsulated in lipid nanoparticles (either artificial or repurposed extracellular vesicles) as a proven gene therapy vector, however, adjusting the behavior of skin cells to generate elastin or collagen to reverse some of the loss of structure and elasticity in aged skin seems a practical goal at the present time. This while bearing in mind that elastin structure is complex, and any solution there will probably look more like adjusting the regulation of correctly structured elastin deposition rather than just expressing more elastin. LNP-delivered mRNA lasts only a short time in tissues, a matter of a few days at most. This is a big advantage for any therapy one might hope to deliver to very large numbers of people, given the way that regulators such as the FDA think about risk and safety. From a regulatory point of view, one of the (many) issues with the early gene therapy technologies, such as viral vectors, is that they last for...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs