Tuning Liposome Stability in Biological Environments and Intracellular Drug Release Kinetics

Ideal drug carriers should be stable in biological environments but eventually release their drug load once inside the targeted cells. These two aspects can be in contrast with each other, thus they need to be carefully tuned in order to achieve the desired properties for specific applications. Quantifying drug release profiles in biological environments or inside cells can be highly challenging, and standard methods to determine drug release kinetics in many cases cannot be applied to complex biological environments or cells. Within this context, the present work combined kinetic studies by flow cytometry with aging experiments in biological fluids and size-exclusion chromatography to determine drug release profiles in biological environments and inside cells. To this purpose, anionic and zwitterionic liposomes were used as model nanomedicines. By changing lipid composition, liposome stability in serum and intracellular release kinetics could be tuned and formulations with very different properties could be obtained. The methods presented can be used to characterize liposome release profiles in complex biological media, as well as inside cells. In this way, liposome composition can be tuned in order to achieve formulations with optimal balance between stability and release kinetics for specific applications.