posted on 2024-03-05, 13:04authored byRichard Fiedler, Gobika Sivakumaran, Jasmin Mallén, Mika Lindén
Mesoporous silica
nanoparticles have repeatedly been shown to be
a promising drug carrier because of their high porosity, biocompatibility,
and inherent degradability. The kinetics of degradation is an extremely
important parameter, as both the clearance time in vivo and, in many cases, the drug delivery kinetics are closely linked
to the dissolution rate. Thus, a synthetic means to control the dissolution
rates is an important part of nanoparticle optimization for a given
application. Another important parameter influencing the fate of the
nanoparticles in a biological system is their size. Optimally, it
should therefore be possible to independently tune the dissolution
rate without simultaneously changing the particle size. Here, we present
means to achieve this by looking at both intracellular and extracellular
degradation, using mesoporous silica shell-SPION core nanoparticles,
where the porosity of the shell can postsynthetically be varied without
changing the original size of the particles in combination with the
macrophage cell line J774.A1. Furthermore, it is also shown that the
kinetics of intracellular silica dissolution is much slower than that
of extracellular dissolution. However, the trends in terms of dissolution
kinetics for the different particles also hold for intracellular dissolution.
Furthermore, our results also indicate that the intracellular dissolution
kinetics are related to the nanoparticle concentration within vesicular
compartments.