Student: Martin Janata
Vedoucí: Xiaohui Ju, Ph.D.
Stav projektu: dokončený
Anotace:
Nanotechnology has already greatly impacted medicine. Most recently, it has been found that cerium oxide nanoparticles (CeNPs) possess antioxidant activity at physiological pH values, and it has the potential use in biomedical applications to protect against oxidative stress[1]. It is noteworthy that biological applications of CeNPs usually require durable CeNPs solutions stable against aggregation in biological solutions. This brings about the necessity of development of methods for their synthesis and characterization[2]. Mesoporous silica nanoparticles (MSNs) were developed and investigated as smart drug delivery systems by many research groups worldwide[3, 4]. MSNs present well-defined and tunable physicochemical properties, including particle size, pore size, pore volume, surface area, volume area, pore structure, and surface functionality[5]. In the present project, we plan to optimize the synthesis condition of MSNs-CeNPs by controlling MSNs pore size distributions. MSNs will be synthesized in-situ with CeNPs using one-pot chemical precipitation method. It has been reported that pore sizes of MSNs can be simply tuned by varying reaction parameters[6]. Synthesis conditions of reagent concentrations (e.g. ethanol/water ratio) will be optimized to achieve the best loading capacities of CeNPs into MSNs. UV-Vis spectroscopy will be used to quantify the approximate loadings of CeNPs.