Unmet Need
Polyelectrolyte nanoparticles have been widely used for various therapeutic delivery applications, from low molecular weight drugs to peptides and proteins. They are prepared by mixing oppositely charged polymers in aqueous media and are heterogeneous in terms of size and surface charge. However, current production methods rely on bulk mixing techniques that are difficult to scale up and suffer from high batch-to-batch variation and there does not exist a method for continuous production of nanoparticles. Therefore, there is a strong need for a method of mass producing these nanoparticles consistently to increase the accessibility of these drug therapies.
Technology Overview
Johns Hopkins researchers have developed a scalable method of producing discrete polyelectrolyte nanoparticles with uniform shape and size distribution. Using a confined impinging jet device, the method involves the self-assembly of oppositely charged polyelectrolyte biomacromolecules, such as PEI/DNA, under rapid and homogeneous mixing conditions, resulting in condensed and compact nanoparticles while retaining their intrinsic physiochemical properties. The inventors have demonstrated that these nanoparticles have improved particle size and shape distributions and exhibit higher cell transfection efficiency when compared to a bulk preparation method.
Stage of Development
Proof of concept.
Patent
US10441549B2
Publication
Santos JL, Ren Y, Vandermark J, Archang MM, Williford JM, Liu HW, Lee J, Wang TH, Mao HQ. Continuous Production of Discrete Plasmid DNA-Polycation Nanoparticles Using Flash Nanocomplexation. Small. 2016 Dec;12(45):6214-6222.
