(100g) D o E - Assisted Development of Sustainable Mesoporous Silica Synthesis for Tailored Drug Delivery Applications.

Porous silica has been widely researched as a material for use in drug delivery. The advantages of porous silica as a drug delivery system are pores of consistent size, uniform distribution and high volume which would make it optimal for drug loading. Unfortunately, existing silica materials have limited applications to drug delivery systems due to harsh conditions needed during synthesis, poor sustainability and an inability to effectively scale up the manufacturing process. Using a bio-inspired synthesis, we have been able to achieve a room temperature, rapid process to generate mesoporous materials suitable for drug delivery.

In the present work, we explore the parametric space of bio-inspired silica using a latin hypercube sampling methodology for establishing space filling variables and understand the relation between parameter, property and performance. The properties identified as critical quality attributes for drug delivery systems were the surface area, the surface charge and the yield of reaction. We successfully achieved precipitation of 300 materials with tailored properties by varying the synthetic parameters, including synthesis pH, precursor concentration, stoichiometry and purification conditions. We characterised all the materials for their porosity using nitrogen adsorption, zeta potential using light scattering and SI speciation (yield of reaction) using silicomolybdate assay. The results suggest a variety of outcomes can be achieved by varying our input parameters with surface areas ranging from 30-500m²/g, surface charge ranging from -40 to +10 mV. Following the design and development of drug testing protocols. We have loaded our bio-inspired silica with the drug proxy calcein using wet impregnation of the material and measured the release profile and release kinetics. The presentation will show our results on developing a relationship between synthesis- property - performance, which will enable tailored drug delivery systems using a sustainable process designs.