Discovery and Basic Research
Helder Santos (he/him/his)
Full Professor and Head of Department
University Medical Center Groningen
Sudip Das, PhD (he/him/his)
Professor of pharmaceutics & drug delivery
Butler University
Indianapolis, Indiana
Drug carriers are gaining increased attention during recent years, due to their advantages. This includes increased drug stability, increased protection of drug against enzymatic metabolism, possibility of controlled drug release, high drug loading capacity, biocompatibility, less variability in release mechanisms and their kinetics, potential for increased permeability due to lipid and surfactant contents, and hence, enhanced bioavailability, and ligand mediated or passive targeting due to their small size through oral, parenteral, dermal, nasal, ocular, and pulmonary routes of administration.
Scale-up of nano/micro-particles fabrication process using batch techniques typically results in a reduction of control over the synthesis process, leading to wide particle size distributions and, in some cases, to uncontrolled particle aggregation. Current methods of particle synthesis rely largely on batch stirred homogenizers. However, major challenges persist in these systems with regard to process controllability and reproducibility, owing to the rapidity of the involved processes of mixing, nucleation, growth and agglomeration and their complex interactions when they take place concurrently.
Microfluidics has been defined as the manipulation of fluids in channels with dimension of tens of micrometer. Microfluidics has been extensively applied in the fabrication of materials with precisely controlled physicochemical features [1–16]. As a result of its excellent ability to manipulate nanoliters flows, microfluidics has emerged as an alternative technique to the conventional methods for the preparation of nanoparticles. In comparison to the conventional methods, the particle preparation process is miniaturized in the microfluidic device, thereby leading to a reduction in the consumption of regents. Furthermore, microfluidic approaches enable the continuous online synthesis of particles, which could reduce the batch-to-batch variations in the physicochemical properties of the obtained nanoparticles.
In this talk, several examples on how different microparticles and nanoparticles can be prepared and scaled-up using microfluidics, as well as how they can be used to enhance the drug’s targetability, intracellular drug delivery for both cancer chemo- and immune-therapy applications as well as other applications, will be highlighted and discussed. Overall, our results suggest that microfluidics is a versatile technique to prepare advanced drug delivery systems for different pharmaceutical and biomedical applications.
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