(71e) Fabrication of Monodisperse Polyanhydride Nanoparticles Using Emulsion Polymerization

The use of monodisperse biodegradable particles in drug delivery provides competitive advantages in terms of the ability to control the release rate of the payload and to study mechanisms of cellular internalization and activation. In this work, the monomer sebacic acid dimethacrylate (MSA) was used to synthesize crosslinked polyanhydrides for biomedical applications via free radical polymerization. An inverse microemulsion system composed of MSA- and chloroform-swollen micelles stabilized by Span 80 in hexane was studied. The phase behaviour of this system was investigated over a range of temperatures and compositions. Dynamic light scattering was utilized to identify composition and temperature ranges resulting in single populations of micelle sizes. Poly(MSA) nanoparticles were synthesized using free radical polymerization. Particles were characterized by scanning electron microscopy for morphology and light scattering for particle size distribution. The resulting poly(MSA) particles were characterized by a near-monodisperse particle size distribution (PDI < 0.2), with mean particle size varying from 100 nm to 400 nm. The precise fabrication of distinctly sized polyanhydride nanoparticles was shown to depend on the temperature and composition of the microemulsion polymerization.