Glycolipids for Lipid-based Drug Delivery (LDD) System
Glycolipids are the carbohydrate-attached lipids which provide energy and also serve as markers for cellular recognition. They might become a new type of promising non-viral gene delivery systems because of their low cytotoxicity, structural diversity, controllable aqua- and lipo-solubility, appropriate density and distribution of positive charges, high transfer efficiency and potential targeting function. Creative Biolabs is a leading service provider that focuses on all kinds of lipid-based drug delivery technology. Our strong expertise in delivery system design allows us to help clients tackle challenges and accelerate the design and development of drug delivery.
What is Glycolipids
Glycolipids occur in all types of organisms, i.e., bacteria, plants, animals, and humans. They are essential constituents of cellular membranes comprised of a hydrophobic lipid tail and one or more hydrophilic sugar groups linked by a glycosidic bond. The basic structure of a glycolipid consists of a mono- or oligosaccharide group attached to a sphingolipid or a glycerol group with one or two fatty acids. These make up the classes of glycosphingolipids and glycoglycerolipids, respectively. Glycolipids interact and bind to the lipid-bilayer through the hydrophobic nature of the lipid tail which anchors it to the surface of the plasma membrane. The carbohydrate residues of membrane glycolipids and glycoproteins are normally located on the exterior surface of cell membranes. This occurs because carbohydrates are hydrophilic, thus preferring the aqueous outside surface of plasma membranes over the more lipid-rich, hydrocarbon core. Glycolipids are found widely on the outer leaflet of cellular membranes where they play not only a structural role to maintain membrane stability but also facilitate cell-cell communication acting as receptors, anchors for proteins and regulators of signal transduction, but not exclusively, to the plasma membrane.
Fig.1 Structure of glycolipids.
The Role of Glycolipids in Drug Delivery
The application of nanotechnology for cellular delivery of drugs clearly offers new opportunities in the treatment of the major health threats, such as cancer, infections, metabolic diseases, autoimmune diseases, and inflammations. The main challenge of today's nanotechnology is to develop systems that enable real progress to achieve high level protection of active ingredients and space-specific delivery. Glycolipids are amphiphilic molecules that can satisfy these conditions by improving the physical properties of the nanocarriers and promoting cell/tissue specific targeting through carbohydrate-cell protein interactions. Therefore, glycolipids designed for this purpose should have some general characteristics that allow for specificity and high affinity to target cells as well as ease of incorporation into drug carriers. Beside their use as surfactants or absorption enhancers in basic formulations, glycolipids can build gels, liposomes niosomes, hexosomes and cubosomes, whose structure is directly related to lyotropic properties. These systems allow the solubilization and entrapment of drugs. In innovative delivery systems, glycolipids are also used for drug targeting because their sugar moieties can be specifically recognized by carbohydrate-binding proteins exposed at the surface of cells.
Biosurfactants as drug delivery vehicles offer commercially attractive and scientifically novel applications. Therefore, glycolipids have potential applications in drug delivery systems. In addition to liposomes composed of glycolipids, Creative Biolabs offers other customized formulations based on our lipid-based drug delivery (LDD) platform. Please contact us for more information.
For Research Use Only. Not For Clinical Use
