Grant: Collaborative Health Research Projects (NSERC partnered)

Highly porous materials offer significant advantages in many biomedical applications based on their extremely high surface areas. In particular, for the delivery of drugs with low water solubility, the high surface area provided by highly porous scaffolds offers unique opportunities for enhancing drug loading thus improving the efficacy of drug therapy. However, most strategies used to prepare such scaffolds are extremely slow and/or require the use of solvents or other additives that can cause issues when the material is used in the body. Our knowledge user Ceapro (a Edmonton-based biotechnology company) has recently developed a high-throughput and rapid processing technology called pressurized gas expanded liquids (PGX) that overcomes these challenges in addition to offering exceptional control over both the macroscopic size of the materials generated (from large continuous networks to microscale particles) as well as the size of the internal pores. We have also, in partnership, developed methods to (1) convert these biopolymer networks to hydrogels by post-processing the polymer scaffolds and/or performing gelation and PGX processing simultaneously and (2) load multiple drugs via a simple and residual solvent-free process. In this proposed project, we aim to exploit these advantages to address key challenges in treating lung fibrosis and infected wounds. For lung fibrosis, the potential to create a highly porous microparticle delivery vehicles loaded with drug would improve the efficacy of inhalation-based therapy; in addition, one of the key biopolymers produced by Ceapro (beta-glucan) provides desirable cell targeting effects. For wound healing, the capacity of the scaffolds to absorb exudate and load tunable mixtures of drugs offers benefits for delivering synergistic drug combinations to treat antibiotic-resistant infections. Together, this work will leverage a patented Canadian technology (PGX) to address key and emerging health challenges for Canadians.