Release of molecules from nanocarriers

Abstract

Release of drugs or vaccine molecules from macro-, micro-, and nano-sized carriers is usually considered to be limited by diffusion and/or carrier dissolution and/or erosion. The corresponding experimentally observed kinetics are customarily fitted by using the empirical Weibull and Korsemeyer–Peppas expressions. With decreasing size of carriers down to about 100 nm, the timescale of diffusion decreases, and accordingly the release can be kinetically limited, i.e., controlled by jumps of molecules located near the carrier–solution interface. In addition, nanocarriers (e.g., lipid nanoparticles) are often structurally heterogeneous so that the absorption of molecules there can be interpreted in terms of energetic heterogeneity, i.e., distribution of energies corresponding to binding sites and activation barriers for release. Herein, I present a general kinetic model aimed at such situations. For illustration, the deviation of the molecule binding energy from the maximum value was considered to be about 4–8 kcal mol⁻¹. With this physically reasonable (for non-covalent interaction) scale of energetic heterogeneity, the predicted kinetics (i) are linear in the very beginning and then, with increasing time, become logarithmic and (ii) can be nearly perfectly fitted by employing the Weibull or Korsmeyer–Peppas expressions with the exponent in the range from 0.6 to 0.75. Such values of the exponent are often obtained in experiments and customarily associated with non-Fickian diffusion. My analysis shows that the energetic heterogeneity can be operative here as well.