Delivering Bioactive Components for Medical Treatments

SLU ID 14-013 | Fabricating Hydrolytically Degradable Polyethylene Glycol Microsphere Delivery Vehicles

Background

Hydrogel microspheres of less than 200 μm are powerful tools that have a multitude of applications in the areas of drug delivery, tissue engineering, and biosensors. Hydrogels are a preferred choice because of their tissue-like properties; high water content; ease of fabrication; and tunable chemical, mechanical and biological characteristics. Numerous methods have been proposed to generate hydrogel microspheres. However, these methods are often harmful for biological applications such as cell or protein encapsulation. Moreover, most of the dispersion-based methods involve the use of either organic solvent or surfactants. Although methods such as microfluidic devices offer a lot of control over process parameters and fabrication characteristics, the devices are very complex in design and thus have limited applications.

Overview

Researchers at Saint Louis University have developed a method to fabricate hydrogel microspheres composed of multiarm polyethylene glycol acrylates (PEG-Ac) or vinyl sulfones (PEG-VS) and dithiol crosslinkers. The microspheres are biocompatible and suitable for encapsulation and delivery of bioactive components like proteins, cells, or drugs.

Benefits

The potential benefits of this technology include:

• Increasing the ability to tune degradation rates

• Increasing the ability to specify mesh size

• Increasing the ability to tune protein release kinetics

• Increasing the ability to control microsphere size

• Increasing encapsulation efficiency

• Increasing the amount of time that biological activity maintained

• Minimizing damage to bioactive component deliverables

• Minimizing invasiveness of treatments for knee osteoarthritis

• Minimizing the invasiveness of enzyme replacement therapies

• Minimizing the invasiveness of dermal repair procedures

Applications

The potential applications of this technology include:

• Delivering proteins

• Delivering cells

• Delivering enzymes

• Delivering drugs

Opportunity

Saint Louis University is seeking a partner to further develop and commercialize this technology.