Posted by The usual thinking with cyclodextrin is about its capacity to complex small molecules, even there is a considerable bibliography about this. However, wide range of research groups are synthesizing novel materials to pass this limitation. This is the case of group of prof. Francesco Trotta (University of Turin) with his material called Cyclodextrin based Nanosponges (CD-NS), which in the last 13 years have tried to complex more than small molecules, as is the case of proteins. These works have been summarized and discussed in his recent publication in Encyclopedia (MDPI, [1]).
The entry summarized and highlighted the multiple possibilities of CD-NSs to deliver active proteins improving their activity or stability, with a previous description of CD-NSs and their characteristics, all the proteins worked with CD-NS such as Dioxygenase, Bovine Serum Albumin, Lipase, Peroxidase, Lysozyme, Insulin and Nisin have been explained. The applications in general demonstrated a higher stability of the proteins or a change of its capacities (above all in the case of enzymes, where they were proposed as support for them) or with therapeutic proteins such as insulin, which was able to pass the intestinal barrier complexed with CD-NS suggesting interesting biomedical applications.
There is no doubt that although the application or type of protein is different, the versatility of CD-NSs to adapt to each protein makes these materials a promising excipient.
References:
[1] Lucia Appleton, S., Khazaei Monfared, Y., Vidal-Sánchez, F. J., Caldera, F., Cavalli, R., Trotta, F., & Matencio, A. (2022). Cyclodextrin-Based Nanosponges and Proteins. Encyclopedia, 2(2), 752-760. https://doi.org/10.3390/encyclopedia2020052