On-chip Fabrication of Drug-Loaded Chitosan Nanoparticles for Osteogenic Differentiation of Mesenchymal stem cells

Polymeric nanoparticles (NPs) are one of the most promising choices for drug delivery carriers. The microfluidic technique is a new way for producing these carriers and its potential has been demonstrated for synthesizing of chitosan NPs with tunable physicochemical properties. Dexamethasone (Dex) is one of the glucocorticoid drugs and in addition to its anti-inflammatory and an immunosuppressant effect, its ability to differentiate mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) into osteoblasts has also been demonstrated. Here, by using hydrodynamic fluid focusing in microchannels, we succeed to prepare polymeric NPs which have narrower size distributions compared to their counterpart in bulk synthesis method and also create a reproducibility manner for synthesis of polymeric nanoparticles. This technique, however, showed the controlled release of Dex from chitosan NPs with slower release profile than bulk-synthesized nanoparticles which have aided the differentiation of MSCs in proper sequential times

Keywords:

Chitosan nanoparticles , Microfluidic , Dexamethasone , Mesenchymal stem cells , Osteogenic differentiation