Contactless Control of Microbubble-Containing Liposomes Using Ultrasound

Abstract

Drug delivery system (DDS) is a technology to control the effective area and the amount of drug, in order to suppress the harmful side effects. Microbubble-containing liposome (MCL) is one of the possible DDS carriers. MCL is manipulated by acoustic radiation force, which is applied to internal microbubbles, to be trapped around the target area and to be broken to release the internal drug. Previous studies succeeded in disrupting MCL using ultrasound, however, the results did not show enough reproducibility. Also, the method has not been established to manipulate perfectly without contact including positioning. In this study, we aim to realize the contactless positioning of MCL and the selection of MCL with a certain condition to unify the behavior toward the acoustic field. As its first step, we observed and evaluated the behavior of MCL under the standing wave.