Advances in single-cell surface engineering: nano-coating and core-shell strategies for probiotics delivery in inflammatory bowel disease.

Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is a chronic intestinal inflammatory disorder with a complex pathogenesis involving oxidative stress, intestinal barrier damage, gut microbiota dysbiosis, and immune imbalance. Conventional therapies merely alleviate symptoms but fail to achieve a radical cure, and long-term use is associated with adverse reaction and drug resistance. Probiotics represent a potential therapeutic strategy for IBD by regulating gut microecology, repairing the intestinal barrier, and modulating mucosal immunity, yet their clinical efficacy is severely limited by poor gastrointestinal tolerance, low viability, and inadequate colonization after oral administration. Inspired by bacterial self-protection mechanism, this review highlights innovative biomedical material-based probiotics delivery strategies for IBD, including microencapsulation, single-cell encapsulation, disease-targeted modification, and nanozyme integration. These engineered delivery systems innovatively endow probiotics with acid/bile salt resistance, site-specific targeting to inflamed intestinal mucosa, and reactive oxygen species scavenging capacity, while synergistically optimizing the pathological microenvironment of IBD to enhance probiotics colonization and functional activity. We further emphasize the clinical translation potential of these intelligent delivery platform, and discuss the key design principles for improving their biocompatibility, targeting efficiency, and scalability. This review aims to provide theoretical reference and experimental support for the development of intelligent, efficient probiotics delivery system with clinical translation potential, which may help address the unmet therapeutic needs of IBD and act as a novel adjunctive therapy for clinical practice in the future.