BioGraphene Announces Publication in Nano Letters on the Potential of Graphene Quantum Dots as a Therapy for Niemann-Pick Disease Type C

BioGraphene Inc. announced the publication of the journal article titled “Graphene Quantum Dots Alleviate Impaired Functions in Niemann-Pick Disease Type C in Vivo”, which focuses on graphene quantum dots’ ability to ameliorate various impaired functions in Niemann-Pick disease type C (NPC). The paper was featured in the Volume 21 of Nano Letters as the cover article, co-authored by Insung Kang, Ph.D., Visiting Scholar at the U.S. FDA and Je Min Yoo, Ph.D., Chief Technology Officer at BioGraphene.

While the neuropathological characteristics of NPC result in a fatal diagnosis, the development of a clinically available therapeutic agent remains unachieved. BioGraphene demonstrated the use of graphene quantum dots (GQDs) as a potential candidate for NPC by validating their role in ameliorating various impaired functions present in NPC disease pathology. In addition to the previous findings reported in Nature Nanotechnology that GQDs show negligible long-term toxicity and are capable of penetrating the blood−brain barrier (BBB), GQDs treatment reduces the aggregation of cholesterol in the lysosome through expressed physical interactions (Van der Waals interactions). GQDs were also found to promote autophagy and restore defective autophagic flux, which, in turn, decreases the atypical accumulation of autophagic vacuoles. Most importantly, the injection of GQDs inhibits the loss of Purkinje cells in the cerebellum while also leading to reduced activation of microglia. The ability of GQDs to alleviate impaired functions in NPC proves the promise and potential of the use of GQDs toward resolving NPC and other related disorders.

The published article builds BioGraphene’s growing body of work around developing novel therapies for rare disease like NPC and ALS. To this end, BioGraphene is committed to the patients and their families and is actively assembling its preclinical data packet which it will use in its forthcoming Investigational New Drug submission.