Article ID | Journal | Published Year | Pages | File Type |
---|---|---|---|---|
2506437 | International Journal of Pharmaceutics | 2007 | 10 Pages |
SPION with appropriate surface chemistry have been widely used experimentally for numerous in vivo applications. In this study, SPION stabilized by alginate (SPION-alginate) were prepared by a modified coprecipitation method. The structure, size, morphology, magnetic property and relaxivity of the SPION-alginate were characterized systematically by means of XRD, TEM, ESEM, AFM, DLS, SQUID magnetometer and MRI, respectively, and the interaction between alginate and iron oxide (Fe3O4) was characterized by FT-IR and AFM. The results revealed that typical iron oxide nanoparticles were Fe3O4 with a core diameter of 5–10 nm and SPION-alginate had a hydrodynamic diameter of 193.8–483.2 nm. From the magnetization curve, the Ms of a suspension of SPION-alginate was 40 emu/g, corresponding to 73% of that of solid SPION-alginate. This high Ms may be due to the binding of Fe3O4 nanoparticles to alginate macromolecule strands as visually confirmed by AFM. SPION-alginate of several hundred nanometers was stable in size for 12 months at 4 °C. Moreover, T1 relaxivity and T2 relaxivity of SPION-alginate in saline (1.5 T, 20 °C) were 7.86 ± 0.20 s−1 mM−1 and 281.2 ± 26.4 s−1 mM−1, respectively.