Toward the microfluidic generation of higher-order biomimetic nano-assemblies
Colin Pilkington a, John Seddon a, Yuval Elani b
a Department of Chemistry, Imperial College London, Molecular Sciences Research Hub, Shepherd’s Bush, London, W12 0BZ, UK
b Department of Chemical Engineering, Imperial College London, United Kingdom, United Kingdom
Proceedings of Emerging Investigators in Microfluidics Conference (EIMC)
Online, Spain, 2021 July 20th - October 6th
Organizers: Adrian Nightingale, Darius Rackus and Claire Stanley
Oral, Colin Pilkington, presentation 013
DOI: https://doi.org/10.29363/nanoge.eimc.2021.013
Publication date: 5th July 2021

There have been numerous innovations within the field of bottom-up synthetic biology over the past decade. By manipulating the self-assembly of amphiphilic molecules in aqueous media, researchers have fabricated cell mimetics with applications ranging from biosensing to drug delivery. Unfortunately, the incorporation of higher-order complexity into these cell-like chassis is non-trivial for commonly used ‘’bulk’’ approaches such as extrusion and tip sonication. This is mainly due to the poor control offered by these methods over the conditions of self-assembly, including temperature, pressure, and concentration. Several impressive microfluidic platforms have been established to address this shortfall, capable of generating micrometre scale compartmentalised vesicles predominantly via droplet mediated templating. For the pharmaceutical industry however, structures greater than 200 nanometres can pose significant problems for downstream applications. The microfluidic generation of higher-order assemblies on the nanoscale remains relatively under-researched despite these size constraints, and thus presents an exciting new opportunity for scientific investigation. I will introduce some recent work from our group where we harness microfluidic techniques to produce a variety of complex membraneous nanostructures, including cubosomes and multilamellar vesicles. I will also discuss some future research directions for the microfluidic generation of biomimetic nanoparticles and propose some potential applications.  

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