Design of Poly(lactic-co-glycolic acid) nanoparticles in drug delivery by artificial intelligence methods to find the conditions of nanoparticles synthesis

Poly (lactic-co-glycolic acid) (PLGA) is one of the most commonly used polymers for drug delivery due to its biodegradable property. Production of PLGA particles in nanosized scale would be of great importance to exploit the properties of this polymer for nano-based drug delivery. This work explores machine learning methods for the PLGA regression tasks of particle size (nm) prediction and Zeta potential (mV) in the synthesis process. Utilizing a comprehensive dataset with categorical inputs (PLGA type and anti-solvent type) and numerical inputs (PLGA concentration and anti-solvent concentration), the research incorporates Isolation Forest for outlier detection, Min-Max Normalization, and One-Hot Encoding for preprocessing. Several regression models including LASSO, Polynomial Regression (PR), and Support Vector Regression (SVR) were employed in combination with Bagging Ensemble methods for enhanced predictive performance. Glowworm Swarm Optimization (GSO) was applied for hyperparameter tuning. The results indicate that BAG-SVR attained the highest test R² of 0.9422 for particle size prediction. For Zeta potential prediction, BAG-PR outperformed other models, achieving a test R² score of 0.98881.