Synthesis of hollow mesoporous silica nanoparticles with tunable shell thickness and pore size using amphiphilic block copolymers as core templates.

This paper presents a facile method for the fabrication of uniform hollow mesoporous silica nanoparticles (HMSNs) with tunable shell thickness and pore size. In this method, a series of amphiphilic block copolymers of polystyrene-b-poly (acrylic acid) (PS-b-PAA) with different hydrophobic block (PS) lengths were first synthesized via atom transfer radical polymerization (ATRP). The as-synthesized PS-b-PAA and cetyltrimethylammonium bromide (CTAB) were subsequently used as co-templates to fabricate HMSNs. This approach allows the control of shell thickness and pore size distribution of the synthesized HMSNs simply by changing the amounts of PS-b-PAA and CTAB, respectively. In vitro cytotoxicity and hemolysis assays demonstrated that the synthesized HMSNs had a low and shell thickness-dependent cytotoxicity and hemolytic activity. Therefore, these HMSNs have great potential for biomedical applications due to their good biocompatibility and ease of synthesis.