A battery-free nanofluidic intracellular delivery patch for internal organs

Abstract

The targeted delivery of therapeutics to internal organs to, for example, promote healing or apoptosis holds promise in the treatment of numerous diseases^{1, 2, 3–4}. Currently, the prevailing delivery modality relies on the circulation; however, this modality has substantial efficiency, safety and/or controllability limitations^{5, 6, 7, 8–9}. Here we report a battery-free, chipless, soft nanofluidic intracellular delivery (NanoFLUID) patch that provides enhanced and customized delivery of payloads in targeted internal organs. The chipless architecture and the flexible nature of thin functional layers facilitate integration with internal organs. The nanopore–microchannel–microelectrode structure enables safe, efficient and precise electroperforation of the cell membrane, which in turn accelerates intracellular payload transport by approximately 10⁵ times compared with conventional diffusion methods while operating under relatively low-amplitude pulses (20 V). Through evaluations of the NanoFLUID patch in multiple in vivo scenarios, including treatment of breast tumours and acute injury in the liver and modelling tumour development, we validated its efficiency, safety and controllability for organ-targeted delivery. NanoFLUID-mediated in vivo transfection of a gene library also enabled efficient screening of essential drivers of breast cancer metastasis in the lung and liver. Through this approach, DUS2 was identified as a lung-specific metastasis driver. Thus, NanoFLUID represents an innovative bioelectronic platform for the targeted delivery of payloads to internal organs to treat various diseases and to uncover new insights in biology.