Systemic delivery to central nervous system by engineered PLGA nanoparticles.

Neurological disorders are an important global public health problem, but pharmaceutical treatments are limited due to drug access to the central nervous system being restricted by the blood-brain barrier (BBB). Poly(lactic-co-glycolic acid) (PLGA) nanoparticles (NPs) are one of the most promising drug and gene delivery systems for crossing the BBB. While these systems offer great promise, PLGA NPs also have some intrinsic drawbacks and require further engineering for clinical and research applications. Multiple strategies have been developed for using PLGA NPs to deliver compounds across the BBB. We classify these strategies into three categories according to the adaptations made to the PLGA NPs (1) to facilitate travel from the injection site (pre-transcytosis strategies); (2) to enhance passage across the brain endothelial cells (BBB transcytosis strategies) and (3) to achieve targeting of the impaired nervous system cells (post-transcytosis strategies). PLGA NPs modified according to these three strategies are denoted first, second, and third generation NPs, respectively. We believe that fusing these three strategies to engineer multifunctional PLGA NPs is the only way to achieve translational applications.