Microfluidic-controlled manufacture of liposomes for the solubilisation of a poorly water soluble drug

Tools

Kastner, Elisabeth and Verma, Varun and Lowry, Deborah and Perrie, Yvonne (2015) Microfluidic-controlled manufacture of liposomes for the solubilisation of a poorly water soluble drug. International Journal of Pharmaceutics, 485 (1-2). pp. 122-130. ISSN 1873-3476 (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijpharm.2015.02.063)

[thumbnail of Kastner-etal-IJP-2015-Microfluidic-controlled-manufacture-of-liposomes-for-the-solubilisation]
Preview
 Text. Filename: Kastner_etal_IJP_2015_Microfluidic_controlled_manufacture_of_liposomes_for_the_solubilisation.pdf
Accepted Author Manuscript
License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 logo
Download (883kB)| Preview

Abstract

Besides their well-described use as delivery systems for water-soluble drugs, liposomes have the ability to act as a solubilizing agent for drugs with low aqueous solubility. However, a key limitation in exploiting liposome technology is the availability of scalable, low-cost production methods for the preparation of liposomes. Here we describe a new method, using microfluidics, to prepare liposomal solubilising systems which can incorporate low solubility drugs (in this case propofol). The setup, based on a chaotic advection micromixer, showed high drug loading (41 mol%) of propofol as well as the ability to manufacture vesicles with at prescribed sizes (between 50 and 450 nm) in a high-throughput setting. Our results demonstrate the ability of merging liposome manufacturing and drug encapsulation in a single process step, leading to an overall reduced process time. These studies emphasise the flexibility and ease of applying lab-on-a-chip microfluidics for the solubilisation of poorly water-soluble drugs.

CORE (COnnecting REpositories)