Flow-focusing regimes for accelerated production of monodisperse drug-loadable microbubbles toward clinical-scale applications.

ABSTRACT: Ultrasound imaging often calls for the injection of contrast agents, micron-sized bubbles which echo strongly in blood and help distinguish vascularized tissue. Such microbubbles are also being augmented for targeted drug delivery and gene therapy, by the addition of surface receptors and therapeutic payloads. Unfortunately, conventional production methods yield a polydisperse population, whose nonuniform resonance and drug-loading are less than ideal. An alternative technique, microfluidic flow-focusing, is able to produce highly monodisperse microbubbles with stabilizing lipid membranes and drug-carrying oil layers. However, the published 1 kHz production rate for these uniform drug bubbles is very low compared to conventional methods, and must be improved before clinical use can be prac

SUBMITTER: Shih R 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4062572 | biostudies-literature | 2013 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature