Researchers at Nanjing University in China have developed a polymer nanoparticle that can bind to HER2 just as well as antibodies. These nanoparticles can halt the normal functionality of HER2 and reduce the number of new tumor cells that sprout. Their advantage is that, unlike antibodies, they’re cheap to manufacture, easy to handle, and can be kept chemically stable.
Nanoparticles can be molecularly imprinted in that – to simplify – a polymerizable mixture is polymerized into nanospheres in the presence of the (bio)molecules they are supposed to recognize later.
For the imprinting process, the researchers use a special method that is particularly controllable and makes it possible to imprint using chains of sugar building blocks (glycans) as templates. Many proteins contain specific sugar chains. These are unique, like a protein fingerprint. The researchers used this kind of glycan from the extracellular end of the HER2 proteins as their “stamp”. This allowed them to produce imprinted nanoparticles that specifically recognize HER2 and selectively bind to it, inhibiting the dimerization.