Drug Delivery in Biodegradable Polymer Coatings used in Drug-Eluting Medical Devices: An Infrared Spectroscopic Investigation

摘要

Poly(lactic-co-glycolic acid) (PLGA) has generated great interest for its use in medical devices due to its array of properties, such as biocompatibility, biodegradability, and mechanical strength. In addition to these attractive characteristics, PLGA can also be easily loaded with a multitude of drugs or biomolecules and easily integrated or fabricated into different medical devices. For example, drug-loaded PLGA coatings have been used on bare metal stents to provide localized drug delivery to minimize an inflammatory response or prevent a myocardial infarction. With this, an accurate and complete understanding of the underlying drug transport mechanisms out of these PLGA coatings is of great importance for the future design and evaluation of drug-eluting medical devices. For its use in drug delivery, PLGA has been studied using a number of in vitro or ex situ experimental techniques , but little is known about the molecular-level transport that occurs inside these drug-loaded coatings. Only few investigations have used spectroscopic techniques to study the molecular-level drug delivery process.