Characterization of nanopharmaceuticals with field-flow fractionation and light scattering (FFF-MALS-DLS)

In this whitepaper, Waters | Wyatt Technology address a primary challenge in developing formulations for nanoscale therapeutics delivery: particle characterization. Conventional techniques such as dynamic light scattering (DLS), particle tracking analysis (PTA), and transmission electron microscopy (TEM) often involve trade-offs between simplicity, detail, and sampling efficiency. Field-flow fractionation (FFF) is a size-based separation technique covering the entire range of macromolecules and nanoparticles from 1–1000 nm in diameter. Coupling FFF to online multi-angle light scattering (MALS) and DLS detectors provides detailed, quantitative size distributions and structural information, sampled over large ensembles, for good statistical robustness.