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WhatsApp Reddit Professor Rebecca Carrier of Northeastern University studies how mucus affects drug delivery systems. Photo by Alyssa Stone/Northeastern University
Mucus is a thick, sticky substance that lines many parts of the body and plays a vital role in protecting and lubricating vital tissues.
Mucus also plays an important role when researchers develop medicines.
The topic is a key area of interest to Rebecca Carrier, a professor of chemical engineering at Northeastern University and director of the university’s Advanced Drug Delivery Lab.
“So why is mucus so interesting?” Carrier asked recently before an audience at the Curry Student Center on the Boston campus. “Mucus lines all of our moist epithelial surfaces. It forms the first barrier between us and the outside world.”
Carrier was one of more than a dozen leading biomaterials experts who spoke at the recent Biomaterials Society 2024 Northeast Symposium.
The two-day conference, hosted by Northeastern University, brought together industry experts to discuss the field of biomaterials, ranging from immune engineering and regenerative medicine to bioelectrical materials and biointerfaces.
Mucus is a natural biological substance that plays an important role in smell, reproduction and maintaining intestinal health, but it also plays a key role in absorbing drugs in the body, Carrier said.
At a macro level, the mucosal lining has a thin, shiny appearance; at a microscopic level, it looks like a “continuous blanket of material.”
“If you zoom in and look down through that successive layer of material, you start to see this nanoporous network,” she says.
September 20, 2024 – Boston, Massachusetts – Northeastern University Professor Rebecca Carrier speaks at the 2024 SFB Northeast Symposium hosted by Northeastern University in the Curry Student Center on Friday, September 20, 2024. Photo by Alyssa Stone/Northeastern University September 20, 2024 – Boston, Massachusetts – Northeastern University Professor Rebecca Carrier speaks at the 2024 SFB Northeast Symposium hosted by Northeastern University in the Curry Student Center on Friday, September 20, 2024. Photo by Alyssa Stone/Northeastern University September 20, 2024 – Boston, Massachusetts – Northeastern University Professor Rebecca Carrier speaks at the 2024 SFB Northeast Symposium hosted by Northeastern University in the Curry Student Center on Friday, September 20, 2024. Photo by Alyssa Stone/Northeastern University Photo by Alyssa Stone/Courtesy of Northeastern University
Professor Rebecca Carrier of Northeastern University directs the university’s Advanced Drug Delivery Lab. Photo by Alyssa Stone/Northeastern University
To understand how to navigate this network, Carrier says it’s important to understand not just its physical properties but also its chemistry.
Mucus is primarily composed of molecules called mucins, which communicate and bind in a variety of ways, including disulfide bonds, hydrogen bonds, hydrophobic interactions, and electrostatic interactions.
“The same types of interactions that occur between mucin molecules will also be important in controlling drug delivery systems, drugs and other things that are being transported through the mucus layer,” she says.
To study these interactions, Carrier and other researchers in her lab use a technique called “multiple particle tracking.”
The researchers take a sample of intestinal mucus, examine the mucus under a microscope, add fluorescent substances to the mucus (often nanoparticles, sometimes bacteria), and use a video microscope to track their movement through the mucus gel.
“We then use image analysis algorithms to track these particles and analyze their trajectories to extract quantitative parameters that reflect the movement of the particles within the gel and the barrier properties of the gel,” she says.
Carrier first became interested in mucus while working as a scientist at Pfizer: She remembers that while working to define a drug formulation, a small company approached Pfizer with an idea to “fluidize the mucus barrier” and allow it to penetrate the intestinal wall.
“This was interesting to me because historically, when you look at the pharmaceutical literature, there’s been very little discussion of the mucus barrier being an important barrier,” Carrier said. “The mucus barrier is often referred to as the unstirred aqueous layer, and it’s really just a passive diffusion barrier that substances have to get through.”
So Pfizer researchers conducted experiments to test this theory to understand how these drugs interact within the barrier, and concluded that this is key in blocking the passage of the drugs.
Recently, researchers at Northeastern University’s Advanced Drug Delivery Laboratory have partnered with AbbVie Pharmaceuticals to understand how the company’s drugs are affected by mucosal barriers.
“A lot of the work I do now focuses on problems that I saw when I worked in industry,” she says. “So we’re doing a lot of drug delivery, but rather than designing new systems, we’re trying to mechanistically understand the transport process in the intestine and how different drug delivery systems affect that.”
Dr. Carrier’s research in the Gut Lab focuses on studying how various external factors affect mucus. For example, lipids and compounds found in many foods and medications can dramatically affect the barrier properties of mucus.
“We’re very interested in how to develop better model systems to study the mucosal barrier and in a more physiological context to answer some of the questions about the mucus barrier, how it changes upon exposure to different systems, and what is the ability of different systems to penetrate the mucosal barrier.”
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