Thursday, 02 July, 2009
Nanostructured Silica Materials As Drug-Delivery Systems for Doxorubicin: Single Molecule and Cellular Studies
T. Lebold, C. Jung, J. Michaelis and C. Bräuchle -
Nano Lett., 2009, 9 (8), pp 28772883
We apply mesoporous thin silica films with nanometer-sized pores as drug carriers and incorporate the widely used anticancer drug Doxorubicin. Through single-molecule based measurements, we gain mechanistic insights into the drug diffusion inside the mesoporous film, which governs the drug-delivery at the target-site. Drug dynamics inside the nanopores is controlled by pore size and surface modification. The release kinetics is determined and live-cell measurements prove the applicability of the system for drug-delivery. This study demonstrates that mesoporous silica nanomaterials can provide solutions for current challenges in nanomedicine.