There has been a growing interest in the preparation of synthetic capsules owing to their numerous applications (pharmaceuticals, catalysis or imaging). Routes to polymeric colloids in the submicronic scale usually require soft matter technologies (self-organization of amphiphilic block copolymers, LbL deposition on sacrificial template particles, polymerization-induced self-assembly or interfacial polymerization in miniemulsion conditions).Another means of generating nano-objects relies on the nanoprecipitation technique or �Ouzo effect�, the principle of which lies on the supersaturation of whatever hydrophobic solute (oil, polymer, solids) dissolved in a hydrophilic solvent (acetone, DMF�) by adding a far excess of the non-solvent, water. When conditions are set up in a narrow range of the ternary phase diagrams, one can reproducibly generate colloids.  Herein we present a general undemanding strategy to build multi-tagged, oil-filled nanocapsules with controlled morphologies. We show that the exploitation of phase diagrams for polymer/water/acetone and hexadecane/water/acetone systems allows to define experimental conditions in which polymer chains preferentially stick at the interface of the hexadecane droplets to generate polymeric nanocapsules. The resulting nanocapsules can be cross-linked, shell-functionalized with fluorescent tags or molecules of biological interest and/or loaded with actives in a rapid one-pot procedure.                                                   Figure 1: Functional nanocapsules built by nanoprecipitation

Simple but precise engineering of functionalized nanocapsules through nanoprecipitation

248th National Meeting (2014)

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