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Microfluidics based fabrication and manipulation of acoustic liposomes
Already today, microbubbles are being used as ultrasound contrast agents. Their ability to precisely be manipulated to a target area gives rise to a lot of new possible applications. specially the ability to deliver drugs accurately and avoiding drug-tissue interactions with the surrounding healthy tissue would be groundbreaking for modern medicine. WE plan to implement a stable on-chip fabrication of liposomes and microbubbles and study the acoustic effect over the produced microbubbles.
We investigate the effect of flow rates on the size of the produced bubbles and examine their stability.
Keywords: Acoustic, microrobots, drug delivery, biology, chemistry, biomedical
Liposomes revealed promising characteristics to be used in bottom-up synthetic biology to create artificial cells mimicking fundamental properties of living cells for example the exchange of chemical signals between cells. An important feature is their membrane, which shows a close resemblance to the membrane of the ancestors of today’s living cells and thus could help to understand the origins of our cells. Furthermore, liposomes can be produced with different processes and can be controlled in size and shape.Microbubbles are conceptually similar to liposomes, with the main difference being them having a gaseous instead of an aqueous core. The compressibility of the gaseous core results in a strong scattering of ultrasound, which leads to their application as ultrasound contrast agents. MB contrast agents are already
commercially available since the 1990s and are among others used in cardiology and liver imaging. Due to the ability of MBs, to be precisely manipulated to a certain region, they show a great potential to be used for targeted drug delivery. Therefore, MBs are studied for minimally invasive procedures, where drug-loaded MB can be brought to a specific location, where they deliver their drug load and thus do not affect the healthy surrounding tissue.
This project aims to evolve the liposome fabrication process, described by Deshpande, S et al., by using a similar liposome production device. Size control of liposome fabrication and fabrication of biotinylated liposomes to be used in further projects are studied. Furthermore, the same production device is used to optimize the fabrication of MBs. The formed MBs are then studied on their behavior under acoustic signals in different microchannels.
Liposomes revealed promising characteristics to be used in bottom-up synthetic biology to create artificial cells mimicking fundamental properties of living cells for example the exchange of chemical signals between cells. An important feature is their membrane, which shows a close resemblance to the membrane of the ancestors of today’s living cells and thus could help to understand the origins of our cells. Furthermore, liposomes can be produced with different processes and can be controlled in size and shape.Microbubbles are conceptually similar to liposomes, with the main difference being them having a gaseous instead of an aqueous core. The compressibility of the gaseous core results in a strong scattering of ultrasound, which leads to their application as ultrasound contrast agents. MB contrast agents are already commercially available since the 1990s and are among others used in cardiology and liver imaging. Due to the ability of MBs, to be precisely manipulated to a certain region, they show a great potential to be used for targeted drug delivery. Therefore, MBs are studied for minimally invasive procedures, where drug-loaded MB can be brought to a specific location, where they deliver their drug load and thus do not affect the healthy surrounding tissue.
This project aims to evolve the liposome fabrication process, described by Deshpande, S et al., by using a similar liposome production device. Size control of liposome fabrication and fabrication of biotinylated liposomes to be used in further projects are studied. Furthermore, the same production device is used to optimize the fabrication of MBs. The formed MBs are then studied on their behavior under acoustic signals in different microchannels.