Electrospinning of biodegradable drug-eluting nanofibers for medical applications

International Conference and Exhibition on Biopolymers & Bioplastics

August 10-12, 2015 San Francisco, USA

Shih-Jung Liu

Scientific Tracks Abstracts: J Material Sci Eng

Abstract :

Biodegradable nanomaterials are currently designed to transport therapeutic or diagnostic agents through biological barriers.
The material properties of biodegradable nanofibers are extremely advantageous for drug delivery, and the use of drug-loaded
nanofibers has greatly increased over the past decade. Local delivery of pharmaceuticals by using nanofibers allows site-specificity
and requires a lower overall drug dosage with lower adverse side effects. Self-assembly, phase separation, and electrospinning can all
be used to successfully fabricate nanofibers with sizes perfectly within the same range of the fibers present in the native extracellular
matrix (ECM) (50–500 nm). Nevertheless, electrospinning has received the most attentions mainly due to that this procedure is
inexpensive, simple, and versatile, thus being effective for the production of a broad range of scaffold structures and materials.
Different drugs have been loaded onto various nanofibers, including those that are natural, synthetic, and copolymer, for various
medical applications. Pharmaceuticals can also be singly or coaxially loaded onto nanofibers to enhance clinical applications. In
particular, biodegradable drug-eluting nanofibers provide additional benefits to preventing wound adhesion and scar formation
because of their high surface area-to-volume ratios, high porosities, and three-dimensional open porous structures. This presentation
gives current research and breakthrough discoveries on the innovative application of biodegradable drug-loaded nanofibers that will
alter the clinical therapy of various diseases.

Biography :

Shih-Jung Liu is currently Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Chang Gung University of Taiwan. He received the Bachelor degree from
Mechanical Engineering of National Taiwan University in 1986, and earned his Master and PhD degrees from Cornell University and the University of Wisconsin at
Madison in 1989 and 1992 respectively. He had been working as a Post-doctoral research fellow at McMaster University of Canada, and also as a visiting Professor
to the Tokyo Institute of Technology in Japan and Aachen University of Applied Science in Germany. He has been involved in pioneering work on the concepts of
various polymer processing techniques. His research work deals with theoretical and experimental processing of various polymeric materials including engineering
plastics and biomedical materials. He is the author of more than 250 scientific publications including 140 referred journal papers, editor and co-editor of 6 books
and the author of 15 patents. He is also serving as the Associate Editors of Journal of Polymer Engineering and Asia Pacific Journal of Chemical Engineering.