Alena teamed up with Ruchi Goswami and Salvatore Girado from Jochen Gucks lan at the Max-Planck-Zentrum für Physik und Medizin in Erlangen. Together, they developed a new method, named "Progressive Mechanoporation" to deliver small to very large molecules into different cell types by mechanical dispruption of the plasma membrane. Their exciting results were published in the journal “Lab on a Chip”!
The cells are stretched by passing through the nanochip. This creates pores in their cell membrane, allowing molecules to pass through and get inside the cells (© Ruchi Goswami).
Progressive mechanoporation is a high-throughput intracellular delivery method that temporarily perturbs the cell membrane by means of multistage cell deformation. The method provides high delivery efficiency among cells with different mechanical properties without adverse effects on their viability. These characteristics, together with the easy and low-cost production of the transparent PDMS-based devices, make Progressive mechanoporation suitable for a broad range of biomedical, biological and clinical applications including testing novel drugs, and intracellular delivery into hard-to-transfect cells (e.g. immune cells).
In the future, Progressive mechanoporation could be employed in the gene therapy based on ex vivo manipulation of patient cells (e.g. easily access cells of the hematopoietic system) with genome editing technologies such as CRISPR/Cas9, or in preparation of induced pluripotent stem cells for regenerative therapy.
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