Cell-Conditioned Protein Coronas on Engineered Particles Influence Immune Responses

A protein corona, which forms on engineered particles as soon as they are introduced into biological environments, is known to provide particles with a “biological identity”. Protein coronas derived from various biological environments have been demonstrated to alter the cell internalization mechanism, to diminish targeting ability and to induce nanoparticle aggregation. So far, most of these studies have challenged engineered particles with a static biological environment. However, the extracellular environment is highly dynamic due to the process termed “cell-conditioning”, in which cells deplete and secrete biomolecules. In this work, we demonstrate that protein coronas formed on engineered particles from such cell-conditioned media affect the biophysical particle properties and protein adsorption differently to protein coronas derived from an unconditioned environment. When investigating particles with protein coronas formed in various biologically relevant environments for their interaction with immu...