Abstract
Respiratory mucus is one of the main barriers for nanoparticle-based pulmonary delivery systems. This holds true especially for lung diseases like cystic fibrosis, where a very tenacious thick mucus layer hinders particle diffusion to the lung epithelium or the target area. Typically, mean square displacement of particles is used for mobility evaluation. In contrast, our objective is to develop a feasible technique to track directed particle penetration as a prerequisite for efficient pulmonary nanotherapy. Therefore, particle diffusion in artificial mucus was monitored based on confocal laser scanning microscopy (CLSM) and particle-mucus interaction was observed. As pharmaceutical relevant and benign materials, solid lipid nanoparticles (SLNs) were prepared by hot-melt emulsification using glyceryl behenate and different stabilizing agents such as poloxamer-407, tween-80, and polyvinyl alcohol (PVA). The diffusion of labeled SLNs in stained artificial sputum representing CF-patient sputum was verified by 3D time laps imaging. Thus, the effect of coating, particle size and mucus viscosity on nanoparticle diffusion was studied. Using image analysis software "Image J", the total fluorescent signal after 30 min in case of poloxamer-coated SLNs was 5 and 100 folds higher than tween- and PVA-coated SLNs, respectively. Nevertheless, increasing mucus viscosity reduced the diffusion of tweencoated SLNs by a factor of 10. Studying particle-mucus interaction by CLSM can be considered a promising and versatile technique.
