Dr. Joachim Kohn and the NJCBM research group have recently published the results of their collaboration with Meenakshi Dutt’s lab in the Rutgers Biomedical Engineering Department on a promising new nanoparticle construction for drug delivery. The study was accepted by The Journal of Physical Chemistry (an ACS publication) and recently made available online at http://pubsdc3.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acs.jpcb.5b12594
Nanotechnology enables the manipulation of materials on atomic, molecular, and supramolecular scales. In the field of medicine, this often involves the application of various bio-compatible materials in nanoparticle form, which can be used to deliver drugs more efficiently.
The drug loading efficiency of nanoparticles is determined by several factors, particularly the chemical affinity of the loaded drug for the nanoparticle core. Amphiphilic copolymers can be designed to self-assemble with low critical aggregation concentration (CAC), thus providing stable aqueous dispersions of lipophilic drugs by maintaining structural integrity.
Computational methods have been adopted to measure the CAC of block copolymers. A unique advantage of computational methods is the ability to determine CAC values of drug delivery systems based on a virtual library of numerous ABA block polymers.
The corresponding author of this paper, Meenakshi Dutt, has developed a computational model that can predict the CAC without having to make the nanoparticles first. In our publication, these predictions were immediately validated experimentally.
Corresponding Author, Meenakshi Dutt
