3D Composite Assemblies of Microparticles and Nanofibers for Tailored Wettability and Controlled Drug Delivery

Abstract

The control of the drug release kinetics is of prime importance for the design of bioactive nanofibrous membrane. Whereas simple drug‐loaded electrospun poly(lactic acid) (PLA) nanofibrous membranes have a hydrophobic behavior with a water contact angle above 130°, the introduction of poly(ethylene glycol) (PEG) microparticles in the PLA mesh renders the resulting PLA–PEG composites hydrophilic with a water contact angle below 25° enabling water to penetrate efficiently into the mesh. Tuning the wettability impacts the drug release profile and is exploited to design multilayer membranes for temporal and spatial controlled drug delivery: amphiphilic bilayer nanofibrous membranes having one hydrophobic side of dye‐loaded PLA nanofibers and one hydrophilic layer of dye‐loaded PLA–PEG composite allow a preferential release from the hydrophilic side for more than 100 h. Sandwich‐like nanofibrous membranes with dye‐loaded PLA nanoparticles confined between two PLA nanofibrous layers are also envisaged for tailored temporal drug delivery. The delivery of the drug is thus controlled by the thickness and wettability of the external layers of the sandwich. image