Synthesis of new material for drug delivery systems

• Main Author: Goh, Ronald Zi Rui
• Other Authors: Andrew Clive Grimsdale
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2014
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/55854
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Drug delivery systems have always been a very highly researched field of study. An immense amount of research has been done on the synthesis and testing of molecules for drug delivery. It has always been a highly researched field when it comes to researching on Nanoparticle drug delivery carriers for targeted drug carriers, this is especially so for active and passive targeting. As for drug delivery systems pertaining to cancer drug delivery for active and passive targeting, dendrimers have shown promising results showing high levels of monodispersity, surface groups which are highly functionalizable and last but not least, good encapsulation ability. This final year project mainly focuses on the final step of synthesizing a dendron molecule that is able to bind to a zinc oxide drug nanoparticle that contains active targeting moiety, polyethylene glycol chains, and 2 carboxylic acid binding group. The experiments done in this project are multi-step reactions designed to join the moieties to synthesize the molecule. Product of each reaction was characterized with the use of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance spectroscopy. Even though synthesis of the dendron molecules was supposed to yield high purity products, the synthesis of WINNER3 did not show very promising results as it showed other various products upon characterization via Nuclear Magnetic Resonance spectroscopy, so another compound (RON1) synthesis containing 2 carboxylic acid binding groups was conducted instead. Furthermore, this project also shows the synthesis of zinc oxide nanoparticles which was characterized by Transmission Electron Microscopy and X-Ray Powder Diffraction as well. The objective was to see if the zinc oxide nanoparticles would bind to the dendron molecule and the reaction was characterized by Ultraviolet-visible spectroscopy. It would be good that in future work, the actual shape and size of the zinc oxide nanoparticles were further characterized to further confirm the attachment of the dendron molecule and zinc oxide nanoparticles.