Development of a novel anti-inflammatory nanoparticle for the treatment of Acute Lung Injury

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Acute lung injury is a life threatening and incapacitating condition that affects 20% of all critically ill patients in intensive care. Around 30-50% of these sufferers will die from the condition and many survivors can have serious reductions in the quality of the life with chronic lung problems. This not only has a major effect on the patients themselves, but is also a serious resource allocation problem for the NHS as an ICU bed costs in excess of £1800 per day. There is no effective treatments for this condition at this time and therefore new medicines are urgently needed that can deal and stabilise the condition. ALI is characterised by a vicious cycle of inflammation in the lung that leads to inappropriate infiltration of immune cells to the lung. We have developed a potential treatment for this condition that may have the ability to be nasally delivered to patients in intensive care that has potent anti-inflammatory effects. This treatment is a nano-sized formulation that binds specifically to immunosuppressive receptors found on the surface of immune cells such as macrophages, resulting in significant reduction of the production of inflammatory signaling molecules called cytokines. Therefore in this proposal we aim to bring this treatment closer to clinical development by evaluating its effectiveness in a range of preclinical models of ALI. This work will inform us on its effectiveness, side effects and formulation and dosing of the therapeutic required to obtain a significant effect.