New Test to Track How Medicines 'Hitchhike' on Cholesterol

janrinok writes:

https://phys.org/news/2025-10-track-medicines-hitchhike-cholesterol.html

Researchers at The University of Queensland have developed a test that could change our understanding of cholesterol and its potential to ferry deadly cancer messages and life-saving medicines around our body.

Technology developed by Ph.D. scholar Raluca Ghebosu and Associate Professor Joy Wolfram has been designed to assess how different medicines bind to cholesterol particles in our bloodstream.

Ghebosu said mapping this cholesterol "hitchhiking" was crucial to establishing how long medicines remain active, which organs they travel to and, ultimately, how effective they are.

"The problem is that this process requires costly, complex, and time-consuming techniques," Ghebosu said.

"All are significant barriers to what could be a crucial breakthrough in medicine. Our test seeks to simplify the mapping process while also making it much cheaper to get answers."

The new test, named lipoprotein association fluorometry (LAF), was developed at UQ's Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (AIBN) under the mentorship of Associate Professor Wolfram from the AIBN and the UQ School of Chemical Engineering.

Ghebosu said LAF works by using a fluorescent signal to detect when a "molecular handshake" occurs between cholesterol particles and test agents such as medicines.

Crucially, each test is low cost and delivers results in an hour instead of a week.

"By predicting cholesterol binding to various synthetic nanoparticles-as well as polymers, proteins, peptides, and small molecules-we are better placed to uncover information beneficial to drug development," Ghebosu said.

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