Fabricación de liposomas y de cápsulas poliméricas

Abstract

In the last few years, the development of nanoscience and nanotechnology has attracted great interest in different fields. Nanoscience is the science that studies the systems that have at least one of their dimensions of nanometer-size. The study, design, creation, synthesis, manipulation and application of materials, devices and functional systems through control of matter at the nanoscale is known as Nanotechnology. It is frequently considered that the birth of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology goes back to a sentence in a famous conference by Richard Feinman in 1959: There is plenty of room at the bottom. In this conference he suggested the possibility of manufacturing products based on the rearrangement of atoms and molecules. As soon as scientist has begun to manipulate matter at a small scale, new phenomena and properties were founded and nanotechnologiclal methods are used to create inexpensive systems with unique properties. In this way, materials, devices and systems, whose new properties make them useful at physical, chemical and biological levels, are being studied and developed. In 1980 Eric Drexler proposed the concept of "molecular nanotechnology", which focuses on the construction of nanomachines made of atoms that are able to build other molecular components themselves. With the aim of using nanomaterials as carriers of molecules, various types of nanomaterials have been developed such as nanoparticles or carbon nanotubes; and different types of biomaterials such as dendrimers, liposomes or biodegradable polymers. More recently the design of "nanocapsules" has been the object of intense activity. They are hollow nanoscale objects with a roughly spherical shape able to trap small quantities of drugs, enzymes and other catalysts in their interior. Two different regions can be distinguished: the cavity and the coating, which is frequently made of polyelectrolyte multilayers. The best known technique to obtain these systems is by the Layer-by-layer (LbL) or electrostatic selfassembly technique.