Engineering morphology of tetrasulfide-incorporated mesoporous silica nanoparticles for enhanced mRNA delivery

Increasing the length and number of spikes on tetrasulfide-incorporated virus-like porous silica nanoparticles significantly improved cellular uptake and subsequent mRNA expression.

• Why it matters: LNPs remain limited by suboptimal uptake, low mRNA delivery efficacy, and poor stability, motivating a more effective and stable nanocarrier platform.
• What they did: The team tuned VLPSi synthesis parameters to generate distinct morphologies, then optimized performance by measuring uptake, cytotoxicity, and transfection across multiple cell types with different lipid and mRNA payloads.
• The result: Enhanced delivery is linked to nanospikes plus intracellular tetrasulfide degradation, and the nanoparticles also significantly improved mRNA stability, supporting a virus-like topography–chemistry–delivery structure–function relationship.

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