Recently, new progress was made by the laboratory of Biomedical Materials Engineering (1802) with respect to the applications of marine biological polysaccharide. Such finding was published on the front cover of Macromolecular Rapid Communications (2014,18,1606–1610. DOI: 10.1002/marc.201400267).
Marine biological polysaccharide, such as sodium alginate, is biocompatible, biodegradable, widely distributed, and capable of enhancing body immunity, therefore, is widely used as biomedical material or durg delivery system. Base on the in-depth study of marine biological polysaccharide, a new trypsin-inhibition property of sodium alginate was described for the first time. The trypsin active site was prevented from accessing its substrate by means of alginate’s winding. It is confirm that the peroral delivered drug could be efficient protected from protease degraded by marine polysaccharide in this work, using anti-diabetic protein insulin as a model drug, and sodium alginate as a protease inhibitor. The Inhibition efficiency reached up to about 400 times than that of traditional inhibitors. Such inhibitor is a perfect functional carrier to overcome the oral delivery enzyme barriers of protein and peptide drugs, hence, has a broad application prospect in biotechnology and medicine.
This work was supported by the National Key Technology Research and Development Program of China (No. 2013BAB01B01), the Ocean Public Welfare Scientific Research Project of China (Grant No. 201405015-3) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 31271055).
