Department of Molecular Medicine, Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy.
Department of Radiology and Precision Health Program, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan 48824, United States.
Mol Pharm. 2021 Jun 7;18(6):2448-2453. doi: 10.1021/acs.molpharmaceut.1c00291. Epub 2021 May 13.
Nanomedicine has demonstrated a substantial role in vaccine development against severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19). Although nanomedicine-based vaccines have now been validated in millions of individuals worldwide in phase 4 and tracking of sex-disaggregated data on COVID-19 is ongoing, immune responses that underlie COVID-19 disease outcomes have not been clarified yet. A full understanding of sex-role effects on the response to nanomedicine products is essential to building an effective and unbiased response to the pandemic. Here, we exposed model lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) to whole blood of 18 healthy donors (10 females and 8 males) and used flow cytometry to measure cellular uptake by circulating leukocytes. Our results demonstrated significant differences in the uptake of LNP between male and female natural killer (NK) cells. The results of this proof-of-concept study show the importance of recipient sex as a critical factor which enables researchers to better consider sex in the development and administration of vaccines for safer and more-efficient sex-specific outcomes.
纳米医学在针对严重急性呼吸综合征冠状病毒 (SARS-CoV-2 和 COVID-19) 的疫苗开发方面发挥了重要作用。尽管基于纳米医学的疫苗现已在全球数百万人中进行了 4 期验证，并且正在对 COVID-19 的性别分类数据进行跟踪，但 COVID-19 疾病结局所基于的免疫反应尚未得到阐明。充分了解性别对纳米医学产品反应的作用对于对大流行做出有效和无偏见的反应至关重要。在这里，我们将模型脂质纳米颗粒 (LNP) 暴露于 18 名健康供体的全血中（10 名女性和 8 名男性），并使用流式细胞术测量循环白细胞对 LNP 的摄取。我们的结果表明，LNP 在男性和女性自然杀伤 (NK) 细胞之间的摄取存在显著差异。这项概念验证研究的结果表明，受者性别作为一个关键因素的重要性，使研究人员能够在疫苗的开发和管理中更好地考虑性别，以实现更安全、更有效的性别特异性结果。
