(158e) Ionic Liquid Mediated Assembly of CaCO3–Chitosan Nanoboxes

Nanoscale objects are the focus of a great deal of attention not only as critical components in the emergence of cellular life but also as small-scale materials with advanced functionalities and properties that can be isolated or assimilated into numerous applications. In particular, hollow nanostructures have recently received increasing attention owing to their emerging applications in catalysis, separation processes, drug delivery, and energy storage and conversion devices. In this presentation, an innovative approach using ionic liquid (1-butyl-3-methyl-imidazolium chloride) mediated auto-templating assembly of CaCO3 and chitosan to produce well-defined hollow inorganic–organic nanoboxes and nanoframes will be described. With this method, by varying experimental conditions, size and shell-thicknesses of hollow nanostructures can be adjusted from 200 to 400 nm and 15 to 75 nm, respectively. Nanostructure shells had a degradation rate of 1-5 nm/hr in water at 25 °C. This feature is very beneficial for drug delivery applications, and can allow precise programming of the release kinetics of the therapeutic agent within nanoboxes by tuning the wall thickness of nanoboxes.