Nanocolloids are attractive delivery vehicles for drugs with poor aqueous solubility. Despite this, relatively few nanocolloid products exist on the market. Currently, there is a lack of standardization in the pre-clinical, academic setting regarding nanocolloid development and quality control testing. Adaptation of quality by design (QbD) methods used in the pharmaceutical industry to nanocolloid development is a desirable approach that can improve nanocolloid product and process understanding, resulting in an increased number of marketable products.
The central hypothesis of this work is that QbD approaches can be utilized to optimize theranostic (therapeutic and diagnostic) nanocolloid stability, drug loading, and imaging properties. The work presented here addresses this hypothesis through three primary aims. First, QbD approaches were used to develop scalable nanocolloids with optimal colloidal stability and drug loading. In the second aim, nanoemulsions with multimodal imaging capabilities were developed, and QbD approaches were employed to understand the parameters that impact the stability of the imaging reporters. With this knowledge, nanoemulsions with optimal therapeutic and diagnostic capabilities were developed and evaluated for their anti-inflammatory efficacy in the final aim of this work. This work demonstrates that QbD approaches aid in the development of high-quality theranostic nanocolloids. The approaches presented here can be adapted to the development and optimization of other nanomedicines
