Many examples of the therapeutic application of ultrasound contrast agents microbubbles have emerged in the last couple of years. Various microbubble designs have been shown to be capable of carrying drugs to a specific region in the body and enhancing the uptake or delivery efficacy, in particular when drugs are loaded into liposomes and attached to the surface of the microbubbles [2]. Although the therapeutic effect has been shown, the physical mechanism behind it has not been fully clarified. An essential step in the process of triggered drug delivery is the release of a drug from the bubble surface. The release takes place at a microseconds timescale and the drugs or drug-carrying vesicles (order 200 nm) are too small to resolve with a standard microscope. Thus, it is an extremely challenging task to visualize these processes. Here we use high-speed fluorescence imaging to visualize the ultrasound-triggered release from fluorescently labeled liposome-loaded microbubbles at a frame rate of 100,000 frames per second.

High-speed fluorescence imaging of the US-triggered release from liposome-loaded microbubbles

245th National Meeting (2013)

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