The treatment of reperfusion injury after ischemic stroke remains unsatisfactory since the blood-brain barrier (BBB) prevents most neuroprotective agents from entering the brain. Here, a strategy is proposed based on bacteria-derived outer-membrane vesicle (OMV) hitchhiking on the neutrophils for enhanced brain delivery of pioglitazone (PGZ) to treat ischemic stroke. By encapsulating PGZ into OMV, the resulting OMV@PGZ nanoparticles inherit the functions associated with the bacterial outer membrane, making them ideal decoys for neutrophil uptake. The results show that OMV@PGZ simultaneously inhibits the activation of nucleotide oligomerization-like receptor protein 3 (NLRP3) inflammasomes and ferroptosis and reduces the reperfusion injury to exert a neuroprotective effect. Notably, the transcription factors Pou2f1 and Nrf1 of oligodendrocytes are identified for the first time to be involved in this process and promoted neural repair by single-nucleus RNA sequencing (snRNA-seq).
Keywords: bacteria-derived outer-membrane vesicles; blood-brain barrier; ischemic stroke; nano-delivery systems; snRNA-seq.
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