Fractionation and characterization of nano- and microparticles in liquid media

Effects of vibration excitation methodology and configuration of an acoustic needle on its tip vibration

One of design purposes of an acoustic needle is to obtain a big vibration displacement at its tip. In this paper, vibration characteristics of the tip of the acoustic needle driven by a sandwich type ultrasonic transducer, is investigated to obtain the guidelines for increasing the tip vibration. It is found that the tip vibration can be increased by employing acoustic needles with proper vibration excitation structure and configuration. The effective measures include using a sandwich type piezoelectric transducer with flexurally vibrating end plates and an acoustic needle with conical tip section, decreasing the length of vibration excitation section at the needle root, bonding the needle root at a proper location of the transducer end plate, and tuning the length ratio of the conical tip section to the whole needle.

Monolithic precolumns as efficient tools for guiding the design of nanoparticulate drug-delivery formulations

The development of nanomedicines for improved diagnosis and treatment of diseases is pushing current analytical methods to their limits. More efficient, quantitative high-throughput screening methods are needed to guide the optimization of promising nanoparticulate drug delivery formulations. In response to this need, we present herein a novel approach using monolithic separation media. The unique porosity of our capillary monolithic precolumns allows the direct injection and online removal of protamine-oligonucleotide nanoparticles ("proticles") without column clogging, thus avoiding the need for time-consuming off-line sample workup. Furthermore, ring-opening metathesis polymerization (ROMP)-derived monoliths show equivalent preconcentration efficiency for the target drug vasoactive intestinal peptide (VIP) as conventional particle-packed precolumns. The performance of the ROMP-derived monolithic precolumns was constant over at least 100 injections of crude proticle-containing and 300 injections of highly acidic samples. Applying a validated LC-MS/MS capillary monolithic column switching method, we demonstrate the rapid determination of both drug load and in vitro drug release kinetics of proticles within the critical first 2 h and investigate the stability of VIP-loaded proticles in aqueous storage medium intended for inhalation therapy.