Electrospun Nanofibers for Drug Delivery and Biosensing

Abstract

Early diagnosis and efficient treatment are of paramount importance to fight cancers. Monitoring the foreign body response of a patient to treatment therapies also plays an important role in improving the care that cancer patients receive by their medical practitioners. As such, there is extensive research being conducted into ultrasensitive point-of-care detection systems and "smart" personalized anti-cancer drug delivery systems. Electrospun nanofibers have emerged as promising materials for the construction of nanoscale biosensors and therapeutic platforms due to their large surface areas, controllable surface conformation, good surface modification, complex pore structure, and high biocompatibility. Electrospun nanofibers are produced by electrospinning, which is a very powerful and economically viable method of synthesizing versatile and scalable assemblies from a wide array of raw materials. This review describes the theory of electrospinning, achievements, and problems currently faced in producing effective biosensors/drug delivery systems, in particular, for cancer diagnosis and treatment. Finally, insights into future prospects are discussed.

Low-cost FDM 3D-printed modular electrospray/electrospinning setup for biomedical applications

“…Electrospinning is a modern technique in medicine that can fabricate nanostructures, which are mimicking our body's extracellular matrix by the high surface area, providing an excellent scaffold for cell attachment [15]. This makes electrospinning an attractive technique for tissue engineering applications, including vascular graft fabrication [16,17]. It is also widely used in medical diagnosis and drug delivery as they can immobilize the recognition element or active pharmaceutical ingredient due to the large surface area and porosity [15,18,19].…”

Tunable Polymeric Scaffolds for Enzyme Immobilization

“…Electrospun nanofibers are alternative polymeric structures that make use of electrospinning technology (Cleeton et al, 2019) to form large fibers. The most important features of the materials produced by electrospinning are the high degree of porosity (provided by the features of the polymer), the biocompatibility, and the high number of functional groups that can be displayed on the surface (mainly -NH 2 and -OH).…”

Nylon-6/chitosan core/shell antimicrobial nanofibers for the prevention of mesh-associated surgical site infection

“…Predominately, electrospun NFs produced via the blending of a polymer with a drug typically display a rapid burst into the release medium due to small diffusion pathways, which can be influenced by the drug to polymer affinity and the solubility of the drug in the release medium [56]. On the other side, co-axially electrospun drug-loaded systems allow for the encapsulation of an antimicrobial agent within the core of the fibers, increasing the diffusion pathway and thus, retarding the initial burst and sustaining a more modulated release.…”

“…To further investigate the drug release mechanisms, the well-established Korsmeyer-Peppas model was used [56]. Korsmeyer-Peppas categorizes the drug profile based on the release exponent (n) value obtained from the fitting equation.…”