<b>Abstract -</b> The past two decades have seen the emergence of nanostructured materials as platforms for several applications in the fields of medicine and biomedical engineering. For instance, in the field of drugs delivery, these materials have provided extended protection against degradation under different physiological conditions to several biomolecules, including peptides, proteins and vaccines. Over the past few years, our research groups have developed a nanoplatform for the immobilization of biological cell-penetrating agents (e.g., peptides, and transmembrane proteins) based on modified iron oxide nanoparticles (magnetite (MNPs)) The developed nanobioconjugates have demonstrated facilitated cell internalization and endosomal escape abilities. To improve cell penetration even further, we encapsulated the magnetite-based nanobioconjugates into liposomes with very appealing results. The encapsulation and separation processes proceeded with the aid of low-cost microfluidic systems, which were designed and studied in silico prior to fabrication. The encapsulation process was initially studied by a Eulerian approach implemented in software COMSOL Multiphysics 6.0® (COMSOL Inc.,Stockholm, Sweden). In such study, the mixing process was modelled by considering the interaction of a dispersed phase (MNPs) and a continuous phase (PBS) according to the Navier-Stokes equations and within a serpentine micromixer. Here, we aimed at extending the encapsulation process to core-shell, magnetite-chitosan NPs functionalized with cell-penetrating agents, which combine the degradability and ease of modification of chitosan and the magnetic responsiveness of magnetite. The encapsulation was modelled by two different approaches: Mixture model and Euler-Euler model. We included turbulence model κ-ε at low Reynolds number. This was intended to approach experimental values more accurately. Next, we conducted mixing simulations with other micromixers, including SARS, chambers, and serpentine with circular features, which have been reported to achieve high performance. Our results indicate that including the κ-ε turbulence model improve encapsulation results because of the kinetic turbulence energy and dissipation rate of energy. In addition, the Euler-Euler model performance a better encapsulation process than Mixture model. Future work will be dedicated to evaluating the performance of the previously tested magnetophoretic separations with the newly developed encapsulates.

Modeling and simulation of liposome encapsulation of core-shell, magnetite-chitosan nanoparticles in a low-cost microfluidic system

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