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Biomaterials

Poly(ethylene glycol) immunogenicity in tissue engineering

Nature Reviews Bioengineering volume 2, page 373 (2024)Cite this article

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Poly(ethylene glycol) (PEG) is a synthetic polymer commonly used in tissue engineering applications, everyday products and pharmaceutical formulations, such as in the lipid nanoparticles used in SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccines. Growing evidence suggests that anti-PEG antibodies present in the general population may result in adverse effects when PEG-based therapies are administered. However, the effect of anti-PEG antibodies in tissue engineering strategies using PEG-based scaffold materials remains unexplored. Now, writing in Nature Communications, Daniel Alge and colleagues report the implications of anti-PEG immune reactions for PEG-based hydrogel implants and tissue engineering applications.

Thus, the team investigated the influences of pre-existing anti-PEG antibodies on the efficacy of PEG hydrogel-medicated bone regeneration. They induced PEG sensitization by injecting mice with a PEG-functionalized foreign protein to stimulate anti-PEG antibody formation. Subsequently, they implanted growth factor-laden PEG hydrogels into bone defects in the skulls of the mice and assessed bone regeneration efficacy. Sex-dependent differences in anti-PEG antibody formation and immune cell recruitment to the defect site were observed, which implied that differences in bone regeneration may arise from a divergent response. “We also found that the sensitized mice formed more and structurally different bone, compared with a control group that did not have anti-PEG antibodies, particularly in male mice,” says Alge.

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References

Original article

  • Isaac, A. H. et al. Impact of PEG sensitization on the efficacy of PEG hydrogel-mediated tissue engineering. Nat. Commun. 15, 3283 (2024)

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Related article

  • Ju, Y. et al. Anti-PEG antibodies boosted in humans by SARS-CoV-2 lipid nanoparticle mRNA vaccine. ACS Nano 16, 11769–11780 (2022)

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  1. Nature Communications https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

    Sunjie Ye

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  1. Sunjie Ye
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Correspondence to Sunjie Ye.

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Ye, S. Poly(ethylene glycol) immunogenicity in tissue engineering. Nat Rev Bioeng 2, 373 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44222-024-00192-3

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