Advances in drug delivery via electrospun and electrosprayed nanomaterials

Abstract

Electrohydrodynamic (EHD) techniques refer to procedures that utilize electrostatic forces to fabricate fibers or particles of different shapes with sizes in the nano-range to a few microns through electrically charged fluid jet. Employing different techniques, such as blending, surface modification, and coaxial process, there is a great possibility of incorporating bioactive such molecules as drugs, DNA, and growth factors into the nanostructures fabricated via EHD techniques. By careful selection of materials and processing conditions, desired encapsulation efficiency as well as preserved bioactivity of the therapeutic agents can be achieved. The drug-loaded nanostructures produced can be applied via different routes, such as implantation, injection, and topical or oral administration for a wide range of disease treatment. Taking advantage of the recent developments in EHD techniques like the coaxial process or multilayered structures, individually controlled delivery of multiple drugs is achievable, which is of great demand in cancer therapy and growth-factor delivery. This review summarizes the most recent techniques and postmodification methods to fabricate electrospun nanofibers and electrosprayed particles for drug-delivery applications.

Poly(lactic acid) nanofibrous scaffolds for tissue engineering

“…Hydrophilic water-soluble drugs can be incorporated into PLA through water/oil emulsification, allowing for a simple and cost-effective method to electrospin drug-loaded nanofibrous scaffolds with drug loading and encapsulation efficiency higher than other delivery carriers, such as hydrogels and liposomes [17, 18]. This method entraps drug within the polymer matrix as well as retaining some drug at the polymer surface, taking advantage of the degradability of PLA and leading in general to sustained release kinetics with an early burst.…”

“…This approach, together with the more recently developed emulsion electrospinning [18], is now pursued to encapsulate sensitive growth factors and plasmids and to minimize the interaction between the drug and the PLA solvent that may denature the biomolecule/genetic material [22–24]. In the case of drugs that demonstrate slow release rates due to the low wettability of PLA, such as the model protein cytochrome C, the hydrophobic PLA nanofibers can be blended with hydrophilic nanofibers (e.g.…”

Morphological, Mechanical and Mucoadhesive Properties of Electrospun Chitosan/Phospholipid Hybrid Nanofibers

“…Fibers produced by electrospinning [15], are appealing for drug delivery applications due to their high surface area, tunable diameter and surface functionality [16,17,18,19,20] that favors diffusion of the drug, in addition to a high encapsulation efficiency.…”

Evaluation of poly(lactic-co-glycolic acid) and poly( dl -lactide-co-ε-caprolactone) electrospun fibers for the treatment of HSV-2 infection

“…While EFs have been successfully used in many other delivery applications [57–59]; EFs have only recently been explored for microbicide delivery [35, 50, 52–54, 56, 60–62]. Due to their ability to incorporate a diversity of agents with different temporal release characteristics, EFs have the potential to provide prolonged delivery systems for topical active agent delivery to the female reproductive tract.…”