Cytomembrane Infused Polymer Accelerating Delivery of Myelin Antigen Peptide to Treat Experimental Autoimmune Encephalomyelitis

While there has been extensive development of soluble epitope-specific peptides to induce immune tolerance for the treatment of autoimmune diseases, the clinical efficacy of soluble-peptides-based immunotherapy was still uncertain. Recent strategies to develop antigen carriers coupled with peptides have shown promising results in preclinical animal models. Here we developed functional amphiphilic hyperbranched (HB) polymers with different grafting degrees of hydrophobic chains as antigen myelin antigen oligodendrocyte glycoprotein (MOG) peptide carriers and evaluated their ability to induce immune tolerance. We show that these polymers could efficiently deliver antigen peptide, and the uptake amount by bone marrow dendritic cells (BMDCs) was correlated with the hydrophobicity of polymers. We observe that these polymers have a higher ability to activate BMDCs and a higher efficacy to induce antigen-specific T cell apoptosis than soluble peptides, irrespective of hydrophobicity. We show that intravenous injection of polymer-conjugated MOG peptide, but not soluble peptide, markedly treats the clinical symptoms of experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis in mice. Together, these results demonstrate the potential for using amphiphilic HB polymers as antigen carriers to deliver peptides for pathogenic autoreactive T cell deletion/tolerance strategies to treat autoimmune disorders.