Influence of electrolyte and poloxamer 188 on the aggregation kinetics of solid lipid nanoparticles (SLNs)

Solid lipid nanoparticles (SLNs) have attracted increasing attention as colloidal drug carriers due to theirs advantages including low toxicity, drug targeting and modified release. However, undesired particle aggregation in aqueous dispersions would limit the applicability of SLNs for drug delivery. The purpose of the present article is to investigate the aggregation behavior of the SLNs and quantitatively evaluate how the concentration of NaCl and F68 affect the stability of the SLNs. The early stage aggregation kinetics of the SLNs was investigated over a wide range of NaCl concentrations by employing dynamic light scattering (DLS). In the presence of the NaCl, aggregation kinetics of the SLNs exhibited reaction-limited (slow) and diffusion-limited (fast) regimes. These results indicated that the aggregation behavior of these new nanoparticles can be well explained by the classical Derjaguin-Landau-Verwey-Overbeek (DLVO) theory. The critical coagulation concentration (CCC) of SLNs containing 0.0%, 0.1%, 0.5%, 2.0%, and 4.0% of Poloxamer 188 (F68) was 416, 328, 519, 607, and 602 mM, respectively, suggesting that the F68 influences the aggregation behavior of the SLNs. F68 made the SLNs more sensitive to the electrolyte when its concentration is low (0.1%), the bush of the polymer F68 has a bridging effect that accelerated the aggregation process of the SLNs. However, at the high concentration, F68 can provide the steric repulsion to the nanoparticles, which effectively stabilized the SLNs dispersions.