The Horizon of the Emulsion Particulate Strategy: Engineering Hollow Particles for Biomedical Applications

Abstract

With their hierarchical structures and the substantial surface areas, hollow particles have gained immense research interest in biomedical applications. For scalable fabrications, emulsion-based approaches have emerged as facile and versatile strategies. Here, the recent achievements in this field are unfolded via an "emulsion particulate strategy," which addresses the inherent relationship between the process control and the bioactive structures. As such, the interior architectures are manipulated by harnessing the intermediate state during the emulsion revolution (intrinsic strategy), whereas the external structures are dictated by tailoring the building blocks and solidification procedures of the Pickering emulsion (extrinsic strategy). Through integration of the intrinsic and extrinsic emulsion particulate strategy, multifunctional hollow particles demonstrate marked momentum for label-free multiplex detections, stimuli-responsive therapies, and stem cell therapies.

Keywords: Pickering emulsions; label-free detections; multiple emulsions; stem-cell tissue regeneration; stimuli-responsive drug delivery.