Letter to the Editor Concerning Simultaneous, Single-Particle
Measurements of Size and Loading Give Insights into the Structure of
Drug-Delivery Nanoparticles
The vexing error of excess variance in the sizing of single particles
degrades accuracy in applications ranging from quality control of nanoparticle
products to hazard assessment of nanoplastic byproducts. The particular
importance of lipid nanoparticles for vaccine and medicine delivery motivates
this comment on a publication1 in ACS Nano. In ref 1, the
benchmark measurements of a nanoparticle standard manifest large errors of the
size distribution that contradict the claim of validation. Such errors can bias
the correlation of fluorescence intensity as an optical proxy for the molecular
loading of lipid nanoparticles and give misleading insights from power-law
models of intensity−size data. Looking forward, measurement error models have
the potential to address this widespread issue.Comment: Peer reviewed and pending acceptance by ACS Nan