Controlled Microfluidic Synthesis of Nanoscale Lipid Vesicles

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Controlling the size of liposome has critical roles in drug delivery system1. Various size of pure lipid vesicles ranging 50-400 ㎚ were synthesized according to flow rate ratio (FRR) in two solvents, ethanol and IPA. In ethanol, smaller liposomes were obtained due to its low viscosity and high diffusivity. Three-dimensional numerical simulation suggests a parameter predicting liposome size with a linear relation as a characteristic of for self-assembly which interpret the experimental results not only according to FRRs but also solvents. Moreover, the effect of membrane rigidity is also analyzed by adding cholesterols and short-chain phospholipids. On addition of cholesterols, the membrane properties were enhanced so that the size of liposomes increased from 40 ㎚ to 530 ㎚. On the other hands, interposition of short-chain lipids disarranged the alignment of bilayer membrane, which enabled the membrane to be degraded so that the size of liposome decreases. On addition of the short-chain lipids the size of liposome linearly decreases but the gradient is slightly low comparing to the addition of cholesterol (130-230 ㎚).