Partitioning of lidocaine into a model lipid system using avoided level crossing muon spin resonance

Drug design and development is a costly business with a high attrition rate. There are many reasons why a drug may fail to reach its target site of action but for those that need to pass through one or more cell membranes, the interaction of the drug with the membrane itself may be the sticking point. Here, we propose to label lidocaine, a structurally ‘typical’ local anaesthetic, using muons and embed within a model cell membrane. Muons themselves are a type of subatomic particle that decay rather ‘slowly’ (in about the same time it takes for light to travel twice the height of the Shard, in air) but also interact with their local environment. We aim to exploit this in order to gain unprecedented detailed information on how lidocaine interacts with model lipid membranes, therefore allowing us to design more effective drug delivery formulations in the future.