Résumé
Mesoporous Silica Nanoparticles have known a tremendous interest for their potential application in nanomedicine. Indeed, they possess excellent features to be used as drug delivery vehicles such as a low toxicity, a good rigidity, a large pore volume enabling the encapsulation of large amounts of drugs, and the possibility to functionalize easily their surface, for example for targeting cancer cells.[1] However, the mechanism of their synthesis is still not completely understood, and an important variability in the NPs size and shape is observed between reported syntheses. Furthermore, whereas important research has been devoted to small-pores, pure silica nanoparticles, little has been done on large-pores variants and on organosilica-based nanoparticles. For the former type, the hydrolytic stability is a critical challenge to overcome as such nanoparticles may be particularly fragile in biological media. In this presentation, we will discuss some simple mechanistic investigations on the synthesis of mesoporous nanoparticles using pH monitoring and light scattering measurements (Figure 1), which enabled to understand the first steps of the mechanism.[2] We will present the synthesis and hydrolytic stability of silica nanoparticles with large pores, that we found to occur through an intriguing random process [3]. We will also present the potential of original Au@mSiO2 core-shell nanoparticles with large pores to encapsulate proteins such as BSA, RFP and HRP.