Dear all,
We are making some studies about drug loading and release time scales in lipid formulations.
For the time being, we want to use fluorescent methods, and therefore we thought that instead of using actual drugs, we could use fluorescent molecules for now, to serve as a model for the drugs while we optimize our formulations. Hence, we are looking at fluorescent molecules, both polar and apolar that fill the visible spectrum.
We noticed that Fluorescein is extremely used as a relatively small polar drug model, and Nile Red is extremely used as a relatively small apolar drug model. These are the types of molecules we are looking for, but in other regions of the spectrum.
Can you inform me if there are more suitable fluorophores of both polar and apolar nature in other regions of the spectrum? Like blue, yellow, orange, etc?
Lipid molecules such as DHPE-Marina Blue or C18-DiI are not suitable in this case because of their amphiphilic nature…
Thank you in advance!
Sincerely,
Bruno
Try using quantum dots..you can span the entire region of visible range fluorescence.
Quantum dots don't seem like they would have comparable physicochemical properties to drugs.
There are a few drugs that are fluorophors, for example Doxorubicin.
I am not an expert in this, but pharmacologists use a few physicochemical parameters such as logP (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partition_coefficient) to characterize drugs. This means you could probably find tables that list these properties for drugs. And maybe you can find (or predict) the same properties for fluorophores and find a match in that way.
I also want to point you to this article http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0087649 which will give you some idea about what fluorophores are more or less hydrophilic and maybe also point to other resources
Dear Aditya, Thank you for your suggestion, but as Kai pointed out, it is important that the fluorophores also resemble/model drugs in some way.
Thank you so much Kai. We considered doxorubicin in the beginning, but the spectrum is a little too broad for what we are trying to do right now... but we might end up going for it still.
Thank you also for the links. That is the sort of direction I was hoping to get. I will dive in these two deeply. Hopefully will find something.
Kind regards,
Bruno
We published some drug-like fluorophores recently. See: Phaniraj, S.; Gao, Z.; Rane, D.; Peterson, B. R. “Hydrophobic resorufamine derivatives: potent and selective red fluorescent probes of the endoplasmic reticulum of mammalian cells” Dyes Pigments, 2016, 135, 127-133.
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