The great thing about ionic liquids is that every small change you make to their chemistry results in a big change in their properties, said Christine Hamadani, a former graduate student at SEAS and first author of the paper. By changing one carbon bond, you can change whether or not it attracts or repels proteins.

Hamadani is currently a graduate student at Tanners lab at the University of Mississippi.

The researchers coated their nanoparticles with the ionic liquid choline hexenoate, which has an aversion to serum proteins. Once in the body, these ionic-liquid coated nanoparticles appeared to spontaneously attach to the surface of red-blood cells and circulate until they reached the dense capillary system of the lungs, where the particles sheared off into the lung tissue.

This hitchhiking phenomenon was a really unexpected discovery, said Mitragotri. Previous methods of hitchhiking required special treatment for the nanoparticles to attach to red blood cells and even then, they only stayed at a target location for about six hours. Here, we showed 50 percent of the injected dose still in the lungs after 24 hours.

The research team still needs to understand the exact mechanism that explains why these particles travel so well to lung tissue, but the research demonstrates just how precise the system can be.

This is such a modular technology, said Tanner, who plans to continue the research in her lab at University of Mississippi. Any nanoparticle with a surface change can be coated with ionic liquids and there are millions of ionic liquids that can be tuned to have different properties. You could tune the nanoparticle and the liquid to target specific locations in the body.

We as a field need as many tools as we can to fight the immune system and get drugs where they need to go, said Mitragotri. Ionic liquids are the latest tool on that front.

The research was co-authored by Morgan J. Goetz.

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