Immunosuppressive Activity of Size-Controlled PEG-PLGA Nanoparticles Containing Encapsulated Cyclosporine A.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation Journal of Transplantation Volume 2012, Article ID 896141, 9 pages doi:10.1155/2012/896141 Research Article Immunosuppressive Activity of Size-Controlled PEG-PLGA Nanoparticles Containing Encapsulated Cyclosporine A Li Tang,1 Jamil Azzi,2 Mincheol Kwon,1 Marwan Mounayar,2 Rong Tong,1 Qian Yin,1 Robert Moore,2 Nikolaos Skartsis,2 Timothy M. Fan,3 Reza Abdi,2 and Jianjun Cheng1 1 Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL 61801, USA 2 Transplantation Research Center, Renal Division, Brigham and Women’s Hospital; Children’s Hospital Boston, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02139, USA 3 Department of Veterinary Clinical Medicine, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL 61801, USA Correspondence should be addressed to Reza Abdi, rabdi@ and Jianjun Cheng, jianjunc@ Received 13 October 2011; Accepted 6 December 2011 Academic Editor: Andreas Zuckermann Copyright © 2012 Li Tang et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. We encapsulated cyclosporine A (CsA) in poly(ethylene glycol)-b-poly(d,l-lactide-co-glycolide) (PEG-PLGA) nanoparticles (NPs) by nanoprecipitation of CsA and PEG-PLGA. The resulting CsA/PEG-PLGA-NPs were 100 nm in diameter with a narrow particle size distribution. The NP size could be controlled by tuning the polymer concentration, solvent, or water/solvent ratio during formulation. The PEGylated NPs maintained non-aggregated in salt solution. Solid NPs lyoprotected with bovine serum albumin were prepared for the convenience of storage and transportation. The rel