The Bio J-FIL process has been demonstrated to be a viable method for manufacturing nanoscale, polymeric drug carriers. The process allows for precise control of the size and shape of the drug carriers. While the original process is sufficient for research scale projects, reliability issues have prevented it from being scalable to levels that could potentially be used for mass-production of the drug carriers.
In this thesis, a detailed root cause analysis has been conducted to determine the cause of the reliability issues limiting the Bio JFIL process. A series of experiments with varying substrate and imprint fluid combinations were conducted to pinpoint the cause of imprint failure in the Bio J-FIL process. Upon determining the cause of failure, an alternative imprint process was investigated that sought to increase the variety of materials used in the process by utilizing an intermediary layer. This process is referred to in this thesis as the Bio JFIL-I process. The results using Bio JFIL-I indicated increased reliability over the standard Bio J-FIL process. Further refinement of the Bio JFIL-I process could also address additional issues with the Bio J-FIL process unrelated to process reliability. The Bio JFIL-I approach presented in this thesis is complementary to other approaches that have been recently pursued in the literature which are discussed in the thesis. / text
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UTEXAS/oai:repositories.lib.utexas.edu:2152/21893 |
| Date | 01 November 2013 |
| Creators | Marshall, Kervin Scott |
| Source Sets | University of Texas |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Format | application/pdf |
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