NoVELX

Lipid cubosomes and hexosomes are fascinating structures with a highly ordered porous scaffold (thanks to the presence of internal water channels) and a high bilayer-water interfacial area, which make them suitable for applications such as structural biology, drug delivery, catalysis, biosensors and material synthesis. Polymer liquid crystalline nanoparticles (LCNs) also exist and can attain much larger structural parameters, but they suffer from difficulties in their formulation and restricted range of existence. The main bottleneck to the wide use of lipid LCNs is the cost and the limited range of structural parameters (i.e. internal channel size and lattice spacing) attainable with monolein and phytantriol, the mostly used constituents. In an original and simple way, we want to address these two major limitations and extend the achievable lattice sizes of LCNs using economic alternatives (100 times less expensive raw materials). We propose to mix Vitamin E (VitE) derivatives and structurally compatible macromolecules (block and gradient-like copolymers containing VitE in the hydrophobic block) with the aim to obtain stable, reproducible dispersions of LCNs whose topology and structural parameters can be modulated by the copolymer composition and amount. In order to do that, NoVELX consortium will gather together molecular chemists, polymer chemists, physical chemists and a biologist in order to : i) address the synthesis of VitE derivatives (both small molecule and copolymers); ii) characterize the physico-chemical properties of the new LCNs (i.e. size, dispersion, internal channel size, loading and release of model drugs); iii) verify the theurapeutic efficiency of the loaded model drugs. Our results will inspire the design of other new LCNs with tuneable characteristics and help the next generation of nanocarriers in its way to the market.