Qiu, YongzhiTong, ShengZhang, LinlinSakurai, YumikoMyers, David R.Hong, LinLam, Wilbur A.Bao, Gang2017-08-172017-08-172017Qiu, Yongzhi, Tong, Sheng, Zhang, Linlin, et al.. "Magnetic forces enable controlled drug delivery by disrupting endothelial cell-cell junctions." <i>Nature Communications,</i> 8, (2017) Springer Nature: https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms15594.https://hdl.handle.net/1911/97339The vascular endothelium presents a major transport barrier to drug delivery by only allowing selective extravasation of solutes and small molecules. Therefore, enhancing drug transport across the endothelial barrier has to rely on leaky vessels arising from disease states such as pathological angiogenesis and inflammatory response. Here we show that the permeability of vascular endothelium can be increased using an external magnetic field to temporarily disrupt endothelial adherens junctions through internalized iron oxide nanoparticles, activating the paracellular transport pathway and facilitating the local extravasation of circulating substances. This approach provides a physically controlled drug delivery method harnessing the biology of endothelial adherens junction and opens a new avenue for drug delivery in a broad range of biomedical research and therapeutic applications.engThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Journal articleMagnetic_forceshttps://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms15594