May 15, 2015
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 microfluidic mixing, to prepare liposomal solubilizing 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 emphasize the flexibility and ease of applying lab-on-a-chip microfluidics for the solubilization of poorly water-soluble drugs.
Publication - Summary
Nov 15, 2016
International Journal of Pharmaceutics
Liposomes are lipid-based supramolecular assemblies that can be engineered into efficacious drug carriers. Typically described as bilayer systems with an aqueous core, liposomes can increase the therapeutic index of a given drug molecule by decreas...
Publication - Abstract
Mar 18, 2021
Molecular Therapy