A Multiscale study of phosphorylcholine driven cellular phenotypic targeting
Phenotypic targeting requires the ability of the drug delivery system to discriminate over cell populations expressing a particular receptor combination. Such selectivity control can be achieved using multiplexed-multivalent carriers often decorated with multiple ligands. Here, we demonstrate that the promiscuity of a single ligand can be leveraged to create multiplexed-multivalent carriers achieving phenotypic targeting. We show how the cellular uptake of poly(2-methacryloyloxyethyl phosphorylcholine)-poly(2- (diisopropylamino)ethyl methacrylate) (PMPC-PDPA) polymersomes varies depending on the receptor expression among different cells. We investigate the PMPC-PDPA polymersome insertion at the single chain/receptor level using all-atom molecular modelling. We propose a theoretical statistical mechanics-based model for polymersome-cell association that explicitly considers the interaction of the polymersome with the cell glycocalyx shedding light on its effect on the polymersome binding. We validate our model experimentally and show that the binding energy is a non-linear function, allowing us to tune interaction by varying the radius and degrees of polymerisation. Finally, we show that PMPC-PDPA polymersomes can be used to target monocytes in vivo due to their promiscuous interaction with SRB1, CD36 and CD81.