Porous Silicon Nanoparticles
Micro- and nano-based technologies are presently recognized as promising potential tools for drug delivery applications in almost every field of health sciences, aiming to overcome the adverse physicochemical properties of conventional drug molecules, whi
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Porous Silicon Nanoparticles Hélder A. Santos, Ermei Mäkilä, Luis M. Bimbo, Patrick Almeida, and Jouni Hirvonen
Abstract Micro- and nano-based technologies are presently recognized as promising potential tools for drug delivery applications in almost every field of health sciences, aiming to overcome the adverse physicochemical properties of conventional drug molecules, which often lead to poor drug bioavailability. A large amount of the new chemical entities developed by the pharmaceutical industry are poorly watersoluble compounds, which in order to subsist as efficient drugs with improved and controllable in vivo behaviour require the aid of more advanced technologies. In this context, porous silicon (PSi) nanocarriers have received considerable attention for the delivery of a wide range of therapeutics, particularly due to their excellent in vivo biocompatibility, easy surface chemical modification and easy control over their porous network structure. The literature has extensively demonstrated the successful use of PSi for controlling the loading and release of poorly water-soluble drugs; however, in this chapter we will mainly focus on the applications of the PSi-based nanoparticles for biomedical applications. In this chapter, we start by addressing the issues of poorly water-soluble drugs and then introduce PSi-based materials as potential drug carriers for such drugs. We then highlight the fabrication methodology of PSi materials, the drug loading and release, and present several examples of the significant potential of PSi in biomedical imaging and in drug delivery applications. These applications exploit these promising features of PSi for
H.A. Santos (*) • L.M. Bimbo • P. Almeida • J. Hirvonen Division of Pharmaceutical Technology, Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland e-mail: [email protected] E. Mäkilä Division of Pharmaceutical Technology, Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland Laboratory of Industrial Physics, Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Turku, Turku, Finland I.F. Uchegbu et al. (eds.), Fundamentals of Pharmaceutical Nanoscience, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4614-9164-4_10, © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013
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future translation to the clinic. We will conclude the chapter with a brief overview of our visions of the future of the PSi nanomaterials and their implications in the pharmaceutical and biomedical field.
10.1
Introduction
Over the past years great advances in nanotechnology-based platforms have shown remarkable improvements towards more advanced delivery systems in order to efficiently direct the drug molecules to unhealthy tissues or cells. Nowadays, many nanoparticles are used in the clinic and the development of nanodelivery systems may accommodate single- or multifunctionalities on the same entity. However, the biological barriers are very heterogeneous, which may prevent the therapeutic and imaging agents from reaching their intended targets in sufficient amounts. Therefo
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