qNano: High-Resolution Nanoparticle Size and Charge Characterization

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Nanotechnology has led to significant scientific and technological advancements, all driven by the unique properties of materials as their size is reduced to the nanoscale and their surface comprises a significantly higher fraction of the total mass of the material. In this context, having access to methods that provide state-of-the-art accuracy in assessing both the size and surface chemistry (in particular, surface charge) of nanoparticles is essential to correlate the performance of nanomaterials with their properties and thus facilitate the rational and accelerated design of nanoscale technologies. Traditional techniques for such measurements are inherently limited in that they are based on light scattering from large particle populations, giving highly averaged results that tend to over-emphasize larger particles and miss differentiating multiple populations. More recently, single nanoparticle tracking techniques have overcome the population averaging issues but remain dependent on light diffraction and effective optical focusing on particles with multiple sizes within a 3D volume, highly challenging to do without bias. To address this challenge, Izon Sciences has developed the qNano, a unique-to-the-market instrument that instead applies changes in electrical resistance across a pore (the Coulter principle) to measure high-resolution, number-based size and charge distributions as well as nanoparticle concentrations via a single measurement. The higher resolution provided between different populations will allow for significantly more detailed analysis of nanoparticle aggregation, a critical component of ongoing projects among the co-applicants in fields ranging from cancer tumour targeting to mineral flotation. Furthermore, by changing the pore size and/or the pressure driving flow of the particles through the instrument, unique insight can be acquired regarding the elasticity of soft nanoparticles and the dimensions of asymmetric nanoparticles (such as carbon nanotubes and cellulose nanocrystals) in suspension that is inaccessible using any other available instrument. Ultimately, the co-applicants will apply the unique insight to be gained from the qNano to the rational development of drug delivery vehicles for treating cancer as well as ophthalmic and neurological disorders, self-assembled functional biomedical devices that are controllable