Fabrication and in vitro testing of porous silicon microcarriers

Abstract

Porous materials have been used over a decade in tissue engineering and drug delivery. The aim of this study was to prepare porous silicon microparticles with suitable dimensions for using as drug microcarriers. Two types of anticancer drugs, dacarbazine and bleomycine, have been loaded into these systems for in vitro drug release tests carried out by high pressure liquid chromatography (HPLC) method.

Nanoporous Silicon as Drug Delivery Systems for Cancer Therapies

“…Other studies demonstrated the benefits of silica xerogel as controlled release material for the treatment of bone infection [129], and recently, it has been suggested as a coating for metallic implantable materials [130]. Other coatings used for in vitro studies include polymeric matrix of dextran for the release in vitro of two types of anticancer drugs, dacarbazine and bleomycin [105], chitosan polysaccharides to slow down the release of insulin [120] and BSA for capping the antibiotic vancomycin from pSi [131]. The use of biopolymers that are cleaved by specific proteases such as zein (derived from maize) can be potentially used as a highly selective drug delivery system for specific tissues or organs ( Figure 6) [124,132,133].…”

“…Raman spectroscopy has been used during different steps of functionalization and protein grafting [112], while electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) and cyclic voltammetry measurements have been carried out to detect the electrochemical behavior of etched silicon surfaces [61,113]. Drug loading has been monitored by optical interferometric measurements [123], differential scanning calorimetry Journal of Nanomaterials (DSC) [152] and high-pressure liquid chromatography (HPLC) which also determines the chemical purity of the loaded porous particles [105,121].…”