Liposome characterisation

Jose Rizo-Rey Laboratory, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas has used Wyatt Technology's DynaPro range of dynamic light scattering (DLS) instruments to achieve accurate and consistent liposome characterisation. Liposomes are of commercial interest for medical, pharmacological and cosmetic applications since they are used to deliver drugs or genetic material into a cell. The findings are detailed in a new, free of charge application note from Wyatt.

Liposomes have traditionally been studied using such techniques as electron microscopy, fluorescent spectroscopy and HPLC. But now, by using the DynaPro system, the University of Texas has been able to employ the powerful yet easy-to-use tools of DLS to characterise unfractionated liposome samples.

One of most important parameters of a liposomal formulation is its size distribution, which in pharmaceutical applications tends to be in the range of 80,200 nm. The use of DLS and electron microscopy techniques to absolutely characterise particle sizes within this range both yield consistent results, however the University of Texas demonstrated that DLS obtains smaller size dispersions and has the highest sensitivity.