Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) received a patent for a new method of creating various sizes of lipid vesicles for drug delivery. Depending on the therapy that is being administered and its target, nanomedicine often requires different sized containers for the transport of chemical compounds. Creating liposomes, a very common delivery method, has so far led to inconsistencies in their resulting size, negatively affecting any therapies delivered through them.
The NIST team developed a technique that uses microfluidics to create liposomes of any size between 100 and 400 nanometers in diameter. This size is useful for biomedical applications as cells are usually between 1 and 10 micrometers wide.
The lipids are first dissolved in alcohol and pushed through tiny tubes where they’re squeezed by a number of tiny streams of water. Lipids being hydrophobic, they clump together into liposome spheres. By regulating the flow of water flowing at the lipids, the researchers were able to regulate the size of the resulting vesicles. By dissolving drugs into the water at different concentrations, they can also regulate how much of the drugs end up inside the spheres.
Related study in ACS Nano: Microfluidic Mixing and the Formation of Nanoscale Lipid Vesicles…
Via: NIST…