Mechanical Model Development And Cell Experimental Researches On Sonoporation

Sonoporation is a promised technology for drug/gene delivery into cell. Sonoporation is that the microbubbles driven by ultrasound generate pores on cell membrane, which promote the drug/gene into cell to therapy. Sonoporation has several advantages including non-invasive, time controlling, and direction controlling.However there still some important problems in sonoporation. The experimental parameters used in sonoporation cell experiments are adopted by experiences. Although there were many interesting results in sonoporation cell experiments, the sonoporation results can’t be compared with each other. Therefore, despite of the advantages of sonoporation, the sonoporation technology can’t be researched in vivo experiments and even clinic experiments till now.In this thesis, for the purpose to solve those problems above, we try to adopt the mechanics method to development the relationship between experimental parameters and sonoporation results. Firstly, we developed a modified microstreaming-shear stress model, which give out the microstreaming-shear stress generated by microbubble on the cell membrane. And then, based on the modified microstreaming-shear stress model, we developed a sonoporation probability model and a sonoporation fracture displacement model. Finally we adopted SEM and fluorescence dyeing cell experiments to testify our models.By analyzing and comparing the theoretical model with cell experiments, we found that for the first time the sonoporation probability model can explain the relationship between the parameters about ultrasound, microbubble and cell with sonoporation probability. And the sonoporation fracture displacement model gives a new thought of explain the pores dimension using fracture mechanics method.In the other hand, we found that the sonoporation fracture displacement is based on the critical crack size, which can’t be compared with cell experiments. And we also found that the cell characteristics and time factor which have been simplified in our thesis are important parameters too. In the future, it should further improve our sonoporation model, and need more cell experiments to testify these sonoporation models.