Designing nanocarriers to penetrate cartilage and improve delivery of biologic drugs for osteoarthritis

Osteoarthritis is a debilitating joint disease that affects over 30 million people and has no disease-modifying therapies. The current standard of care for the disease is merely palliative until joint replacement is necessary. Disease-modifying osteoarthritis drugs have been tested in the clinic, but all have been unsuccessful in clinical trials. A key point of failure for several of these drugs has been inefficient and inadequate delivery to target cartilage cells. Cartilage is avascular and thus cannot be targeted efficiently through the systemic circulation. Due to the localized nature of osteoarthritis, direct injection of therapeutics into affected joints is an attractive solution to this problem. However, delivery via this approach remains impeded by rapid turnover of the synovial fluid within joints and the dense, highly charged nature of cartilage tissue.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctoral

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Biological Engineering

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2019

Author dc:creator

• Geiger, Brett Charles.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Paula T. Hammond and Alan J. Grodzinsky.

• Biological Engineering.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/121874

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/121874