GIT uses Nanosight to study drug-delivery nanogels

Georgia Institute of Technology is using the Nanosight LM-20 to help characterise dimensional changes of nanogels used to develop drug-delivery vehicles for macromolecular therapeutics.

Prof Andrew Lyon's research group, from GIT's School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, is working on the development and implementation of new, environmentally responsive (or 'smart') materials for photonic materials, bioanalysis and biomimetics.

The group is designing hydrogel nanoparticles that undergo large changes in their chemical, mechanical, optical or electrical makeup in response to a chemical stimulus, biomolecular interaction, or electromagnetic field; such materials can be viewed as amplifiers or sensitisers of the environmental event.

As a result of their environmental sensitivity, nanogels have potential in many applications.

The principal user is PhD candidate Michael Smith, who said: 'The Nanosight has been an enabling tool for us in the characterisation of dilute nanogel samples, where DLS fails to produce reliable correlation data.

'For instance, in our recent investigations of degradable nanogels, we used the Nanosight for sizing and number-density estimation throughout the erosion reaction.

'In these studies, sample concentrations were typically very low at later stages of the degradation reaction (due to particle loss).

'Similarly, the Nanosight is effective at measuring the fractionated samples from asymmetrical flow field-flow fractionation (where samples are greatly diluted following separation).

'The LM-20 has also been used to characterise a variety of other particle types in the group in conjunction with other light scattering and microscopy methods, to provide topological information for various nanoparticles,' he finished.

Nanosight's approach, known as Nanoparticle Tracking Analysis (NTA), is ideally suited to both research and process-control use.

The system is an extremely powerful nanoscale research-and-development tool for looking at a broad range of particle types and concentrations.

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