Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, developing a new coating technology, combined with a novel nanoparticle-manufacturing technology developed at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, say that this could offer scientists a way to quickly mass-produce nanoparticles specially coated for specific applications, including delivering targeted drugs.

By combining the two existing technologies, scientists can produce very small, uniform particles with customized layers of material that can carry drugs or other molecules to interact with their environment, or even target specific types of cells.

Creating highly reproducible batches of precisely engineered, coated nanoparticles is important for the safe manufacture of drugs and obtaining regulatory approval, says Paula Hammond, the David H. Koch Professor in Chemical Engineering at MIT and a member of MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research.

While researchers in her lab had previously developed a layer-by-layer deposition technique to coat nanoparticle surfaces with alternating layers of drugs, RNA, proteins or other molecules of interest, that application process takes too long to be useful for rapid, large-scale manufacture. Applying each layer takes about an hour. In their new study, the MIT researchers used a spray-based technique, which allows them to apply each layer in just a few seconds.

This new process promises to yield large quantities of coated nanoparticles while dramatically reducing production time. It also allows for custom design of a wide variety of materials, both in the nanoparticle core and in the coating, for applications including electronics, drug delivery, vaccines, wound healing or imaging.

Source