Smart soft photonic dressing toward fast drug release and visualized self-monitoring

Abstract Stimuli-responsive microgel have shown great promise in drug delivery material applications. However, it still remains an unresolved problem to establish method that can monitor the degree of drug release in situ and real-time. Here, taking advantage of thermo-sensitive and fast responsive ability of the soft nanoparticles, and inspired by the excellent mechanical properties of polyurethane, a novel materials is presented, which combines the soft particles and polyacrylamide-co-polyurethane acrylate for the first time, the generation of multifunctional material based on soft photonic crystals with tunable structure color and drug delivery capability is reported. As proof-of-concept, BSA was selected as model of protein-based drug, the smart materials exhibit different optical properties during the release of BSA. Consequently, the cumulative release amount of the BSA can be sensitively evaluated by measuring the reflection peak position, and shows a property of self-monitoring. Our strategy is a straightforward way to propose simple smart drug delivery materials whose cumulative release of drug and reflection peak can be tuned through the judicious choice of the temperature, and it has been proved that this is a promising way to construct visualized self-monitoring drug delivery systems using soft colloidal crystal films as stimuli-responsive and drug carrier substrates.