Glucose-responsive nanoparticles designed via a molecular-docking-driven method for insulin delivery

Nocturnal blood glucose regulation was one of the key challenges in diabetic treatments. However, development of the smart insulin complexes with mild and glucose-responsive delivering performances was mostly relied on experience of the senior researchers and numerous confirmation experiments. In this work, a series of bioinspired fatty-acid-modified glucose-responsive insulin-delivering polymeric nanoparticles were designed. The molecular docking technique was utilized to efficiently screen the fatty-acid-derived functional groups. The results provided the basis for polymer functionalization and simplified the optimization experiments. For the optimized formulation (C10MS), insulin-loaded C10MS successfully fulfilled the nocturnal-glycemic-controlling requirement of the diabetic rats with lower occurrence of hypoglycemia than the conventional insulin injection schemes. Such formulation also possessed good biocompatibility with the moderate elimination kinetics in vivo, which matched the demand of bio-safety in the daily treatments. Overall, this work opened up a new path for efficient design of functional polymeric materials.