Abstract

Modulation of immune response is important in cancer immunotherapy, vaccine adjuvant development and inflammatory or immune disease therapy. Here we report the development of new immunomodulators via control of shape transition among RNA triangle, square and pentagon. Changing one RNA strand in polygons automatically induced the stretching of the interior angle from 60° to 90° or 108°, resulting in self-assembly of elegant RNA triangles, squares and pentagons. When immunological adjuvants were incorporated, their immunomodulation effect for cytokine TNF-α and IL-6 induction was greatly enhanced in vitro and in animals up to 100-fold, while RNA polygon controls induced unnoticeable effect. The RNA nanoparticles were delivered to macrophages specifically. The degree of immunostimulation greatly depended on the size, shape and number of the payload per nanoparticles. Stronger immune response was observed when the number of adjuvants per polygon was increased, demonstrating the advantage of shape transition from triangle to pentagon.

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

9-2-2014

Notes/Citation Information

Published in Nucleic Acids Research, v. 42, no. 15, p. 9996-10004.

© The Author(s) 2014. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Nucleic Acids Research.

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/nar/gku516

Funding Information

NIH grant R01-EB003730 from National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Engineering; U01-CA 151648 from National Cancer institute; Funding of Peixuan Guo's Endowed Chair Position from the William Fairish Endowment Fund.

Conflict of interest statement. P.G. is a co-founder of Biomotor and RNA Nanotech Development Co. Ltd; and RNA Nano, LLC.

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