The Power of Field-Flow Fractionation in Characterization of Nanoparticles in Drug Delivery

Abstract

Asymmetric-flow field-flow fractionation (AF4) is a gentle, flexible, and powerful separation technique that is widely utilized for fractionating nanometer-sized analytes, which extend to many emerging nanocarriers for drug delivery, including lipid-, virus-, and polymer-based nanoparticles. To ascertain quality attributes and suitability of these nanostructures as drug delivery systems, including particle size distributions, shape, morphology, composition, and stability, it is imperative that comprehensive analytical tools be used to characterize the native properties of these nanoparticles. The capacity for AF4 to be readily coupled to multiple online detectors (MD-AF4) or non-destructively fractionated and analyzed offline make this technique broadly compatible with a multitude of characterization strategies, which can provide insight on size, mass, shape, dispersity, and many other critical quality attributes. This review will critically investigate MD-AF4 reports for characterizing nanoparticles in drug delivery, especially those reported in the last 10–15 years that characterize multiple attributes simultaneously downstream from fractionation.

Impact of Protein Nanoparticle Shape on the Immunogenicity of Antimicrobial Glycoconjugate Vaccines

“…All selected nanoparticles were successfully chemically conjugated to activated MenW oligosaccharides thanks to the presence of multiple lysines on their surface, achieving a high glycosylation degree. Several parameters of the nanoparticles before and after conjugation were controlled using a panel of complementary techniques, including AF4, a gold standard worldwide for nanoparticle characterization [54,55,[62][63][64][65].…”

“…To overcome the limitations of traditional chromatography, AF4 analysis was set up. This technique separates large aggregates and particles (e.g., LNPs, VLPs, and polymers) based on their size [54,55]. This separation is obtained by the difference in mobility in the flow field induced by the liquid flow over an inert membrane and across the channel.…”

Definition, detection, and tracking of nanowaste in foods: Challenges and perspectives

“…Asymmetric flow field‐flow fractionation (AF4) provides valuable insights into NM properties and is useful for detecting and characterizing nanowaste in food (Quattrini et al., 2021). The technique helps to identify and quantify the presence of nanowaste in food by separating and characterizing NPs according to their size and shape (Bian et al., 2023). Magnetic field flow fractionation (MFFF) uses a magnetic field to separate particles based on their magnetic susceptibility in order to separate and characterize magnetic NPs, including nanowaste in food samples (Yeh et al., 2020).…”

Material-specific binding peptides empower sustainable innovations in plant health, biocatalysis, medicine and microplastic quantification

“…These conditions allow for biomolecules and peptides to maintain their native structure, which is highly relevant for preserving the biological or pharmaceutical functionality of emerging materials such as nanocarriers for drug delivery, including lipid, virus-and polymer-based nanoparticles. 578 Similarly, maintaining these interactions is important when studying the nature of environmental nanoplastics and their association with natural organic matter and pollutants. 579,580 Finally, with a view to the future, coupling FFF analytics with innovative particle labelling methods based on material-specific binding peptides could provide advances in the sizing and identification of nanoplastics derived from environmental waters or biomatrices.…”