Bottom‐Up Preparation of Phase‐Separated Polymersomes

Abstract

AbstractA bottom‐up approach to fabricating monodisperse, two‐component polymersomes that possess phase‐separated (“patchy”) chemical topology is presented. This approach is compared with already‐existing top‐down preparation methods for patchy polymer vesicles, such as film rehydration. These findings demonstrate a bottom‐up, solvent‐switch self‐assembly approach that produces a high yield of nanoparticles of the target size, morphology, and surface topology for drug delivery applications, in this case patchy polymersomes of a diameter of ≈50 nm. In addition, an image processing algorithm to automatically calculate polymersome size distributions from transmission electron microscope images based on a series of pre‐processing steps, image segmentation, and round object identification is presented.