Date of Award

2016

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science in Chemical Engineering (MSChE)

Department

Chemical Engineering

First Advisor

Geoffrey D. Bothun

Abstract

In biomedical applications, nanocarriers provide specific advantages such as deliveryand biopolymers and lipids. On the other hand, stimuli-responsive nanocarriers provide a safe method for drug delivery applications. These carriers use different triggers (including temperature) to release the drug. Light can be used as an external trigger to increase the temperature and finally releasing the drug. This thesis describes the development of functionalized liposomes via using different polyelectrolyte coatings to template the synthesis of light activated nanocarriers.

In the first part, layer-by-layer coating of liposomes with strong biopolyelectrolytes was examined to have a better understanding of structure-property relationship of polyelectrolytes and layersome behaviors. The stability study of the structures in NaCl solutions with different concentrations demonstrate that the stability behavior depended on the outer layer coating. Samples with positive outer layer show more stability in salt solutions compared to the samples with negative outer layer. For the second part, nearinfrared (NIR) active gold nanostructures on hollow spherical soft templates were prepared by using wet chemistry method. Light scattering, spectroscopy and imaging techniques were used to examine morphology and NIR activity of hollow gold nanoshell structures based on layersome template. The results show by using layersome, small hollow gold nanoshell structures with NIR activity could be formed.

All in all, these studies show a method to change the lipid ordering through coating process, alter the stability just by changing the outer layer of liposome and also an easy procedure to make a substrate for stimuli-responsive nanocarriers.

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