Effects of Compositional Tailoring on Drug Delivery Behaviours of Silica Xerogel/Polymer Core-shell Composite Nanoparticles

Abstract Conventional core-shell polymer nanoparticles usually exhibit a rapid release rate with their release kinetics mainly adjusted through changing composition of the polymer shells, limiting their applications for prolonged drug delivery. As a solution to these problems, silica xerogel/polymer core-shell-structured composite nanoparticles have been proposed. Different with our previous work centring on studying process variables, we here focused on investigating the effects of key compositional variables on essential properties of the composite nanoparticles. The drug release profiles (in vitro) were well interpreted by the Baker and Lonsdale model on a predicted two-stage basis. The first stage (