The non-specific adhesion of spherical particles to a cell substrate is
analyzed in a parallel plate flow chamber, addressing the effect of the
particle size. Differently from other experiments, the total volume of the
injected particles has been fixed, rather than the total number of particles,
as the diameter d of the particles is changed from 500 nm up to 10 μm. From
the analysis of the experimental data, simple and instructive scaling adhesion
laws have been derived showing that (i) the number of particles adherent to the
cell layer per unit surface decreases with the size of the particle as d^(-1.7)
; and consequently (ii) the volume of the particles adherent per unit surface
increases with the size of the particles as d^(+1.3). These results are of
importance in the "rational design" of nanoparticles for drug delivery and
biomedical imaging.Comment: Submitted on behalf of TIMA Editions
(http://irevues.inist.fr/tima-editions
