Highly Mesoporous Silica Nanoparticles for Potential Drug Delivery Applications

Abstract

There is an increasing interest in the use of silica nanoparticles (NPs) for bioapplications. Highly mesoporous fluorescein dye-doped silica NPs that can carry a drug payload have been successfully synthesized through a facile microemulsion process. The morphology of the as-prepared silica NPs were characterized by scanning electron microscope and transmission electron microscope, whereas their optical properties were studied by photoluminescence spectroscopy. The results revealed that these silica NPs exhibit excellent properties, including large pore volume, a narrow size distribution and strong fluorescent properties. The synthesized silica NPs showed a good biocompatibility and a low cytotoxicity when incubated in a murine fibroblast L-929 cell line. The obtained silica NPs were further used as drug delivery carriers to investigate the in vitro drug release properties using doxorubicin (DOX) as a representative drug model. It was shown that synthesized silica NPs well sustained drug release properties, suggesting their potential applications for drug delivery.