Introduction
Our team aims to create a highly adaptable smart drug delivery system, which could be used for several applications and alternatives in disease treatment. The design makes it so flexible that it could even be possible to adapt it to the patient’s individual needs. By being highly adaptive, the system we propose would also reduce the cost of targeted drug delivery because, instead of creating a new system for each drug and each patient, one could simply use the basic part that we made, modify them slightly and assemble them.
A Proof of Principle
Our effort is limited to a proof of principle. We used E.coli as model organism. Using the principles of synthetic biology we aimed to engineer an E.coli Bacterium that expresses streptavidin on its surface and contains a pH sensing promoter that controls the expression of gelatinases. Those bacteria would be able to bind biotinylated nanoparticles.