Institut Fresnel

Following the 2013 proposal by Tania Puvirajesinghe (CRCM, Institut Paoli-Calmettes, Aix-Marseille University) of a biocloak for the control of drug release (in collaboration with Sebastien Guenneau at Institut Fresnel), some experiments have shown that surrounding graphene sheets by layers of amino-acids makes a biocloak that not only kills tumoral cells (in vitro experiments for internalization of a nanoparticle into a breast cancer cell for further drug release, as shown in the below figure with the drug shown in red deposited onto graphene oxide which has grey contrast in transmission microscopy) but also considerably reduces the toxicity of graphene oxide.

As a result a European patent has been filed in 2016 with Inserm Transfer (with Aix-Marseille University/CNRS/INSERM, Kings College London and Imperial College London) and some preclinical tests are underway. This work aims to improve the structure of Antibody Drug Conjugate therapy, which is the leading form of targeted therapy available, already licensed for patient use since 2003.

This research has pertinent generic application to the industry of therapeutic antibody treatment, which is expected exceed 58 billion in 2016. This research is funded by Fondation A*MIDEX (project BIOCLOAK).

Publications :

[Gue-5] Sébastien Guenneau, T. Puvirajesinghe. Fick’s second law transformed: one path to cloaking in mass diffusion. Journal of the Royal Society Interface, 2013, 10 (20130106).
[Gue-] S. Guenneau, D. Petiteau, M. Zerrad, C. Amra, T. Puvirajesinghe, Transformed Fourier and Fick equations for the
control of heat and mass diffusion, AIP Advances, 5, 053404 (2015),
DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4917492
[Puv-1] T.M. Puvirajesinghe, Z.L. Zhi, R.V. Craster, S. Guenneau,
Modulation of diffusion rate of therapeutic peptide drugs using graphene oxide membranes, arXiv preprint (2015), arXiv:1512.08506

Brevet :

Tania Puvirajesinghe, Zhi Lane, Richard Craster, Sébastien Guenneau, A 3-dimensional spherical cloak for prolonged delayed diffusion of a therapeutic peptide drug and a small chemical compound used as anti-cancer agents. Antibody structures provide targeted therap, European Patent n° : EP16305485.1. 2016

Contact: Sébastien Guenneau & Tania Puvirajesinghe (CRCM, Marseille).