Automated and Advanced Characterisation of Single Nanoparticles

从药物输送到医学成像再到超灵敏生物传感器，纳米颗粒已经给医学领域带来了革命性的变化。然而，许多纳米颗粒的制备仍然是采用本体合成的方法，这导致了对颗粒大小和负载效率等性质的控制不力。这种异质性具有重大的生物学后果，这可能严重阻碍纳米医学向临床的转化。微流控技术提供了一个很有前途的解决方案。与块状方法相比，微流体中使用的小体积提供了对质量传输的更好的控制，允许更均匀的纳米颗粒的物理化学性质和更高的批次之间的重复性。一种有效的方法是Sparta，这是一种最近开发的高通量自动化技术，它使用拉曼光谱非破坏性地分析单个纳米颗粒。该项目将使用斯巴达来评估用原料法和微流体法制备的各种纳米药物的质量。为了提供补充的成像信息，样品将用液体电子显微镜进行表征，这是一种能够以亚纳米分辨率成像水中样品的技术。该项目将专注于可扩展到工业的技术和先前批准用于人类的材料，以提高拟议技术的翻译质量。

Nanoparticles have revolutionised areas of medicine ranging from drug delivery to medical imaging to ultra-sensitive biosensors. However, many nanoparticles are still prepared with bulk synthesis methods, which leads to poor control over particle properties such as size and loading efficiency. This heterogeneity has significant biological consequences, which can severely impede the translation of nanomedicines to the clinic. Microfluidics offers a promising solution. The small volumes used in microfluidics offer improved control over mass transport compared to bulk approaches, allowing for more homogeneous nanoparticle physiochemical properties and higher batch-to-batch reproducibility.To assess inter-particle heterogeneity requires single particle characterisation techniques. One effective method is SPARTA, a recently developed, high-throughput and automated technique that uses Raman spectroscopy to non-destructively analyse single nanoparticles. This project will use SPARTA to assess the quality of various nanomedicines prepared with bulk and microfluidic methods. To provide complementary imaging information, samples will be characterised with liquid-phase electron microscopy, a technique capable of imaging samples in water with sub-nanometre resolution.This project will focus on techniques which are scalable to industry and materials which are previously approved for used in humans to improve the translational quality of the proposed technology.