Microfluidic Synthesis of Bionanomaterials
Droplet microfluidics enables the generation of highly uniform emulsions with excellent stability, precise control over droplet volume and morphology, which offer superior platforms over conventional technologies for material synthesis and biological assays. We show that robust and scalable generation of uniform droplets using a multilayer device formed by stacking layer-by-layer of the polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) replica patterned with parallelized generators for synthesis of polyacrylamide hydrogel and Poly (l-lactide-co-glycolide) (PLGA) through water-in-oil (W/O) and oil-in-water (O/W) emulsion templates (Micromachines, 2019).
We demonstrated controlled synthesis of nanomaterials enabled by microfluidic mixing. Using our novel micro/nanofluidic devices, we fabricated PFC nanodroplets with controlled size and high monodispersity and synthesized various kinds of PFC nanodroplets as small as 200 nm in diameter with PDI < 0.04 (Lab on a Chip, 2017; Microfluidics and Nanofluidics, 2019)
We further explored the potentials using the developed nano/microcapsules for cancer therapy in collaboration with medical doctors and scientists at Sun Yat-Sen University Cancer Center and Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. We show that the developed PFC nanoemulsions and lipid oxygen microbubbles can serve as agents to supply endogenous oxygen to fuel singlet oxygen generation in PDT which greatly improve the efficacy of cancer therapy (ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, 2018). To enhance oxygen delivery to tumor tissues, we designed oxygen carriers preferentially possess stimuli-responsive properties for spontaneous oxygeneration in response to a minor pH drop in the tumor microenvironment (Langmuir, 2019).
