Electric Stimulus-Responsive Chitosan/MNP Composite Microbeads for a Drug Delivery System.

Abstract

In the last several years, conventional drug delivery systems (DDS) have evolved into DDS that are responsive to exogenous or endogenous stimuli. The objective of this paper is to present a DDS that is responsive to an electric stimulus in the form of bipolar electric pulses. The DDS structure is based on chitosan embedded with magnetic nanoparticles, and crosslinked with polyethylene glycol dimethacrylate to form microbeads. This DDS is loaded with vancomycin as the therapeutic agent of interest. Silver inter-digitated electrodes (IDE) were printed on polyimide substrates with a MEMS-based inkjet material deposition printer, and used to provide 100 Hz pulses of electric current to the DDS for 3 min. The results showed that the stimulated groups released ∼800% more vancomycin than the non-stimulated groups in the excitation duration, but followed a first-order elution profile otherwise. Another significance of our approach is that it does not need complicated or expensive fabrication processes, and can be customized according to the targeted implant site. The IDE system has also been modeled using COMSOL to study the distributed electric fields and ion migration during the stimulus. This paper demonstrates a novel and promising technique of providing stimulus to drug substrates for controllable drug delivery.