Development of macromolecular drug delivery systems

• Main Author: Cheong, Denise Guan Ping
• Other Authors: Czarny Bertrand Marcel Stanislas
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2024
• Subjects: Engineering; Macromolecular drug delivery system
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/176250
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Wound healing is our body’s natural physiological response to destroyed or damaged tissue. This is essential to prevent infections and restoring of bodily functions after injury. Traditional wound care methods have been in place for years, but advancements like hydrogel dressings offer improved therapy. Furthermore, hydrogels have high water retention and can serve as a drug delivery system allowing it to be used a therapeutic wound dressing. Current research focus on regenerative tissue engineering is stem cell therapy using mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) which has demonstrated promising wound healing properties. However, risks such as immune rejection has led researchers to seek better alternatives of cell-free therapy like MSC-extracellular vesicles (MSC-EVs) and lately MSC-derived nanovesicles (MSC-NVs). The aim of this project is to fabricate and characterise a PEG-based hydrogel with unprecedented compositions of poly(ethylene glycol) methyl ether acrylate (PEG-MEA Mn 480) and poly(ethylene glycol) diacrylate (PEG-DA Mn 700) for MSC-NVs delivery. Upon successful production of MSC-CDNs and MSC-EVs using a recently developed cost-effective cell mechanical shearing method, vesicles were characterised using BCA and NTA analysis and found to have particle size of approximately 160 nm which is in the range of microvesicles. In-vitro drug release testing of MSC-CDNs and MSC-EVs encapsulated in different compositions of PEG-MEA and PEG-DA demonstrated a swelling-controlled release profile. Furthermore, rheological and swelling kinetics analysis demonstrated the correlation between hydrogel composition ratios and crosslink density, which in return changing the drug release profile. Making this hydrogel composition highly flexible in controlling its drug release profile, suitable to formulate into therapeutic wound healing applications However, future work still needs to be done to better characterise and optimise its drug delivery mechanism and determine its biocompatibility and suitability for therapeutic wound healing applications.