The major use of this equipment will be for the development of a novel drug delivery system comprised of microencapsulated liposomes and designed to produce devices that deliver drugs in either a pulsatile fashion, or in response to an external trigger. Liposomes, the major component of the proposed drug delivery device, range in size from 20 to 3500 nanometers. They are lamellar particles consisting of highly ordered concentric phospholipid bilayers, and require a high speed centrifuge to be separated from solutions in which they are suspended. This equipment is capable of separating micron and submicron sized particles by sedimentation at high g values, and would, therefore, be very useful in both the preparation of the liposomes and the monitoring of the delivery profile from the drug delivery devices.
