In 2025, approximately 2.0 million people will be diagnosed with cancer in the United States, with breast cancer remaining the most common diagnosis. Despite advancements in treatment, an estimated 618,120 cancer-related deaths are expected, highlighting the urgent need for improved therapeutic strategies. Drug delivery systems (DDSs) such as liposomes have been widely studied for their ability to encapsulate both hydrophilic and hydrophobic drugs, improve tumor targeting, and reduce systemic toxicity. However, liposome production can be costly, storage-sensitive, and difficult to replicate, which has increased interest in niosome - non-ionic surfactant vesicle that offers lower cost and greater stability. Current niosome preparation methods often rely on sonication, which limits precise control over vesicle size and rarely achieves particles near 100 nm. Therefore, this research focused on developing an alternative extrusion-based procedure for preparing niosomes, using thin-film hydration followed by extrusion, and comparing the results with established liposome preparation methods. In detail, niosomes and liposomes are formulated using thin-film hydration and extrusion with the goal to create spherical, uniform-size distributions. Tween 85, Tween 80, and Span 60 are surfactants that are being used to create niosomes samples with different ratios of cholesterol. These samples are then evaluated using dynamic light scattering to find average effective diameter and polydispersity index. By comparing and analyzing each trial of samples, solutions have been used to enhance the result of niosomes procedure including reducing total mass and concentration, replacing freeze–thaw cycling with a thermal process, testing alternative surfactant-to-cholesterol ratios, and employing smaller extrusion membranes. In conclusion, the primary result of this research is that among the all experimenting samples, Span 60 combined with cholesterol at a 1:2 ratio produced the most consistent niosomes preparations (diameter = 260 nm, polydispersity = 0.19); however, further optimization is required to establish reproducibility and enhance the result of the niosome’s size. Further work is required to refine the extrusion process using smaller pore membranes, expand formulation ratios, and apply advanced characterization techniques to validate reproducibility and performance.
