Bottom‐Up Preparation of Phase‐Separated Polymersomes

• Published in: Macromolecular bioscience 2023-08, Vol.23 (8), p.e2300068-n/a
• Main Authors: Almadhi, Safa, Forth, Joe, Rodriguez‐Arco, Laura, Duro‐Castano, Aroa, Williams, Ian, Ruiz‐Pérez, Lorena, Battaglia, Giuseppe
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Algorithms; Drug delivery; Image processing; Image segmentation; Nanoparticles; phase separation; Polymers; polymersomes; Rehydration; Self-assembly; Topology; vesicles
• ISSN: 1616-5187; 1616-5195
• DOI: 10.1002/mabi.202300068

A bottom‐up approach to fabricating monodisperse, two‐component polymersomes that possess phase‐separated (“patchy”) chemical topology is presented. This approach is compared with already‐existing top‐down preparation methods for patchy polymer vesicles, such as film rehydration. These findings demonstrate a bottom‐up, solvent‐switch self‐assembly approach that produces a high yield of nanoparticles of the target size, morphology, and surface topology for drug delivery applications, in this case patchy polymersomes of a diameter of ≈50 nm. In addition, an image processing algorithm to automatically calculate polymersome size distributions from transmission electron microscope images based on a series of pre‐processing steps, image segmentation, and round object identification is presented. A scalable, reproducible, bottom‐up method for the fabrication of low polydispersity suspensions of patchy polymersomes that are characterized using a high‐throughput image analysis algorithm is presented. The size range and choice of Generally Recognized As Safe materials mean this work has significant relevance for targeted drug delivery applications.