A facile sonochemical route for the fabrication of magnetic protein microcapsules for targeted delivery.

Protein microcapsules have received considerable attention as effective drug delivery carriers for the treatment of deadly diseases, such as cancer, in the biomedical field. Up to now, extensive efforts have been devoted to fabricate the protein microcapsules and several approaches have been developed. Suslick and co-workers used high-intensity ultrasound to make aqueous suspensions of proteinaceous microcapsules filled with water-insoluble liquids and demonstrated the chemical mechanism of their formation. Lu et al. fabricated protein capsules through protein adsorption at the surface of the organic droplets followed by evaporation of the organic solvent. Balabushevich et al. produced stable polyelectrolyte capsules by the layer-by-layer (LbL) assembling of biodegradable polyelectrolytes, dextran sulfate, and protamine on melamine formaldehyde (MF) microcores followed by core decomposition at low pH. Among the various routes, the sonochemical method has proved to be a simple and effective technique for fabricating protein microcapsules due to the convenient processing and experimental setup, significant saving in time, and excellent products. In addition, the hydrophobic drugs could be directly loaded into protein microcapsules by dissolving drugs in the oil phase before sonication. Magnetic nanoparticles (MNPs), especially iron oxide (Fe3O4) MNPs, also have shown great prospect in biomedical application due to their good biocompatibility, strong superparamagnetism, nontoxicity, and easy preparation proACHTUNGTRENNUNGcess.[20–28] Introducing Fe3O4 MNPs into the biocompatible protein microcapsules are of particular interest, because protein microcapsules functionalized with Fe3O4 MNPs would possess several attractive advantages from a pharmaceutical standpoint: