Evaluation of Novel Strategies for Carbon Nanotube Functionalization by TGA/Chemometrics

Innovative preparation strategies for nanomaterial functionalization were proposed to provide novel tool to be used as drug delivery vectors for biomedical applications. In particular, three different carbon nanotubes were considered in this study such as the very small CNTs, the carboxylated CNTs (CNT-COOH) and the buckypapers and two polymers were used to study the functionalization. Different preparation procedures were investigated by thermogravimetric analysis (TGA), including the selection of the most performing polymer to be linked to the nanomaterial between PEI and PAMAM, the percentage of the polymer and the time of suspension. To simultaneously evaluate all these variables, an experimental design was planned and the recorded data were processed by chemometrics to identify the preparing procedure providing new nanomaterials able to conjugate microRNAs and to transfect efficiently endothelial cells.