화학공학소재연구정보센터
Journal of the American Chemical Society, Vol.142, No.8, 3862-3872, 2020
Enhanced in Vivo Blood-Brain Barrier Penetration by Circular Tau-Transferrin Receptor Bifunctional Aptamer for Tauopathy Therapy
The lack of blood-brain barrier (BBB) penetrating ability has hindered the delivery of many therapeutic agents for tauopathy treatment. In this study, we report the synthesis of a circular bifunctional aptamer to enhance the in vivo BBB penetration for better tauopathy therapy. The circular aptamer consists of one reported transferrin receptor (TfR) aptamer to facilitate TfR-aptamer recognition-induced transcytosis across BBB endothelial cells, and one Tau protein aptamer that we recently selected to inhibit Tau phosphorylation and other tauopathy-related pathological events in the brain. This novel circular Tau-TfR bifunctional aptamer displays significantly improved plasma stability and brain exposure, as well as the ability to disrupt tauopathy and improve traumatic brain injury (TBI)-induced cognitive/memory deficits in vivo, providing important proof-of-principle evidence that circular Tau-TfR aptamer can be further developed into diagnostic and therapeutic candidates for tauopathies.