A NOVEL PATENTED METHODOLOGY TO PREPARE POLYMERIC MICRO AND NANOPARTICLES FOR BIOMEDICAL APPLICATIONS

In the last decades, the design of polymeric materials for biomedical applications has been extensively investigated and advances in the production of new biomolecular drugs (proteins, nucleic acids, antibodies, growth factors, etc....) has led to the development of novel polymer-based controlled drug delivery and gene terapy systems. Controlled drug delivery technology represents one of the most rapidly advances areas in science in which polymer and biochemical scientists are contributing to biomedical research. Delivery systems offer many advantages as compared to traditional dosage forms, including improved efficacy, reduced toxicity improved patient compliance and cost effective therapeutic treatment. As it is well known, nanoparticles can be obtanined by several techniques, starting either from monomers or preformed polymers, depending of their chemical nature and on the chemico-physical characteristics of the biomolecules entrapped. In this work we describe a novel patented methodology and its relative applications to prepares polymeric materials with nanostructure feature. This method allows to generate nanostructures from pristine amorphous polymers of almost any kind of chemical structure, i.e. biopolymers (for example polysaccharides) and synthetic, functional and structural polymers (for example polystyrenes, polymethylmethacrylates, polylactic acid). The nanostructure of these macromolecules, considered in this work as the prototypes of various classes of polymeric material, was achieved by using a simple and versatile method, based on an osmotic based method (OBM). Depending on the choice of solvent/non solvent pairs, the dialysis membrane molecular weight cut off (MWCO), temperature and polymer concentrations, different morphologies can be obtained (spheres, sponges, disks, fibres) and also a tuning of the nanoparticle dimensions ranging from micro to nanoscale is obtainable. Here will be reported some recents results on the preparation of nanostructured polymeric systems. and encapsulation of different biomolecules (DNA, 5FU, dexamethasone) into the nanostructured materials.