A cure for bee stings?

In the current issue of Chemical & Engineering News, a small article titled "Plastic Antibodies Target Peptide" explains a new method of removing bee toxins from blood. Molecularly imprinted polymeric (MIP) nanoparticles can act as "plastic antibodies" to neutralize toxins in live animals. Researchers from UC Irvine developed the MIP nanoparticles to target the peptide melitten, a component of bee venom that tears cells open such that their cell-entrails spill out. Given enough, melitten may lead to kidney failure and death.

The nanoparticles are created by polymerizing acrylamide monomers (a monomer is a molecule that has the potential to bind other molecules of the same species to form a polymer). You don't need to know about acrylamide, but in case your curiosity got the best of you, wikipedia has a good entry.

The authors began the study by injecting a lethal dose of melitten into mice. They then immediately injected the melitten-targeting MIP nanoparticles into a selected group of mice, which a control group did not receive. The MIPn mice showed a significantly higher survival rate than the control group.

Note that the MIP nanoparticles had already shown an affinity and selectivity toward melitten in vitro that is comparable to those of natural antibodies in older studies. The mice study here is the first animal study involving the MIP nanoparticles. According to Steven C. Zimmerman from UI Urbana-Champaign, this is an "excellent demonstration" of synthetic antibodies to "selectively bind peptides and related targets in the complex environment within the bloodstream."

The antibodies are also said to show minimal toxicity. The measurements were conducted via florescence-imaging of dye-labeled nanoparticles and melitten. The nanoparticles and melitten were shown to accumulate in the same cells in the liver, suggesting that the nanoparticles sequester the toxin and that the complex is then cleared from the body by the liver.

Needless to say, nanoparticles could be synthesized for a variety of targets; this may mean that the sky is the limit within this new field of research.