Active scaffold for on-demand drug and cell delivery

• Main Author: Ng, Candy Ting Ting.
• Other Authors: Raju Vijayaraghavan Ramanujan
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2012
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Materials::Biomaterials
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/48437
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Cancer is a leading cause of death worldwide and side effects on cancer patients from conventional cancer treatment therapy are inevitable. Polymer coated magnetic nanoparticles (MNP) are attractive drug carriers for targeting specific tumors with minimal systemic distribution of the anti-cancer drugs. The objective of this work is to develop and study a polymer-magnetic drug delivery system consisting of iron oxide nanoparticles as the magnetic component and alginate as the polymer. In this work, beads consisting of alginate encapsulated magnetic nanoparticles were synthesized, characterized by x-ray diffraction (XRD), thermal gravimetric analysis (TGA), vibrating sample magnetometry (VSM) and dynamic light scattering (DLS) techniques. Fe3O4 MNP of mean diameter 15 nm were synthesized by the co-precipitation method. The synthesized MNP exhibited excellent magnetic properties with saturation magnetization of 55 emu/g. VSM results show that the MNP exhibit superparamagnetic behaviour. Composite beads consisting of MNP dispersed in an alginate matrix were synthesized by a one-step drip method utilizing calcium choride as the crosslinker. The saturation magnetization of the beads was found to be dependent on the MNP concentration, magnetization values of 0, 3, 5, 11, 20, 55 emu/g were obtained from 0, 5,10, 25, 50 and 100 wt% MNP respectively. Average diameter of the beads was found to be ~2.35 mm by measuring the size of swollen beads. The water content of the swollen beads was determined to be ~97 wt% by TGA and by the weight measurement of swollen beads before and after dehydration. Drug release for selected batches of composite beads loaded with the anti-cancer drug doxorubicin (9 wt%) were performed at 37.1 °C for up to 75 h. The highest drug release rate was during the first 4 hours followed by slow release. After 75 h, 27 % of dox loaded was released. The alginate-MNP system was found to exhibit good potential as a drug delivery system.