Drug-based magnetic imprinted nanoparticles: Enhanced lysozyme amyloid fibrils cleansing and anti-amyloid fibrils toxicity

Lysozyme amyloid fibrils, the misfolding structures generated from natural state of lysozyme, are found to be related with non-neuropathic systemic amyloidosis. Therefore, inhibiting the formation of amyloid and disaggregating amyloid fibers are both effective strategies. Herein, we present a combination of Epigallocatechin-3-gallate (EGCG), imprinting technology and magnetic nanoparticles to obtain a kind of promising nanomaterials (MINs@EGCG) for amyloid inhibition, drug carrier and facile separation triple functions. We declared the efficacy of MINs@EGCG from two perspectives. For inhibition, Circular dichroism (CD) spectrum illustrated that the miss transition from α-helix structure to β-sheet could be blocked by MINs@EGCG, and the inhibition efficiency was higher than 80%. These results were further verified by Thioflavin T (ThT) analysis. For disaggregation and cleansing, the helical and highly periodic structure of amyloid fibrils could be converted into their counterparts by MINs@EGCG. Furthermore, with the aid of external magnetic field, the cleansing efficiency of counterparts-MINs@EGCG complex was up to 80%. Most importantly, bio-related experiments showed superior biocompatibility and anti-amyloid fibrils toxicity of MINs@EGCG, indicating the great potential of our system to work as an effective amyloidosis therapy platform.