Polymer nanoparticles and nanofibers: Drug delivery and environmental applications

Since “nanotechnology” was presented by Nobel laureate Richard P. Feynman during his well famous 1959 lecture “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom”, there have been made various revolutionary developments in the field of nanotechnology. However, nanotechnology has emerged in the last decade as an exciting new research field. Nanotechnology represents the design, production, and application of materials at atomic, molecular and macromolecular scales, in order to produce new nanosized structures where at least one dimension is of roughly 1 to 100 nm, i.e., less than 0.1 μm. However, materials below or next to 1 μm (1000 nm) can be also commonly referred as nanomaterials or, more correctly, ultrathin materials. According to this, specifically within fiber science related literature, fibers with diameters below 1 μm are broadly accepted as nanofibers. Nanotechnology and nanoscience studies have emerged rapidly during the past years in a broad range of product domains. Today, nanoscience represents one of the rapidly growing scientific disciplines due to its enormous potential and impact in many different technological and engineering applications, which includes the development of new materials with novel and advanced performances. Recently, the nano-scaled materials have attracted extensive research interests due to their high anisotropy and huge specific surface area. Furthermore, the continuously increasing interest in the nanostructure materials results from their numerous potential applications in various areas, particularly in biomedical sciences. Today, nanofibers and nanoparticles are at the forefront of nanotechnology because of their unique properties such as low density, extremely high surface area to volume ratio, flexibility in surface functionalities, superior mechanical performance (e.g. stiffness and tensile strength), and high pore volume and controllable pore size that cannot be found in other structures. In this context, our researches have been concentrated on the production and modification of polymeric nanofibers and nanoparticles as drug delivery and environment applications. To this purpose, selected materials for the nanofibers development (polyhedral oligomeric silsesquioxanes, modified poly(amido-amine) dendrimers, and modified hyperbranched polyglycerol) were combined with biopolymers, namely (poly(L-lactide) (PLLA) and poly(ε-caprolactone) (PCL) which enable us to overcome typical shortcomings of the above polymer matrices. As well, poly(styrene-co-maleic anhydride) (PSMA) amphiphilic copolymer was used for production of nanoparticles.