The emerging field of nanotechnology has the potential to transform biomedical research and medicine, revolutionizing both medical diagnostic methodologies and medical treatments. One of the main challenges for the utilization of nanoparticles in medicine is that many of these nanoparticles are toxic or have deleterious effects in biological systems. We aim to overcome this challenge by fabrication of sol-gel based nontoxic hybrid nanoparticles. The sol-gel method is a synthetic method that allows for the formation of porous solid matrices. Such matrices have been used in the fields of organic chemistry, inorganic chemistry and material science. For silica-based starting materials, the resulting matrix is an amorphous Si-O-Si network that is chemically and mechanically stable, optically transparent and most importantly non-toxic. In particular, these matrices are able to immobilize different analytes and are used for a variety of different applications such as sensors and biosensors. Rather than generating a bulk or film matrix, a possible extension of this field is the synthesis of a matrix of nanometric size i.e. nanoparticles or better put, nanogels. This yields matrices that have all the advantages of sol-gel as well as the advantages of nanoparticles. Here we present our recent work on fabrication of silica-based hybrid nanogels and their characterization using dynamic light scattering (DLS) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). We present different strategies for encapsulating biomolecules within the nanogels to better serve their potential applications.

Fabrication of silica based sol-gel hybrid nanoparticles

ACS Spring 2022

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.