Liposomes produced by microfluidics and extrusion: A comparison for scale-up purposes

• DOI: 10.1016/j.nano.2019.02.019
• Publication Date: 2019-03-13T02:46:56Z
• Authors: Vidhi M. Shah; Duc X. Nguyen; Pragnesh Patel; Brianna Cote; Adel Al-Fatease; Yvonne Pham; Man Gia Huynh; Yeonhee Woo; Adam WG Alani
• Keywords: 0301 basic medicine; 0303 health sciences; Cell Survival; Microfluidics; Vinblastine; Sphingomyelins; Solutions; Drug Liberation; Inhibitory Concentration 50; Kinetics; Mice; 03 medical and health sciences; Cholesterol; Liposomes; Toxicity Tests, Acute; Animals; Female; Particle Size

Successful liposomal formulations in the clinic are severely limited due to poor translational capability of the traditional bench techniques to clinical production settings. The gold standard for liposome bench manufacturing is a multi-step and parameter dependent extrusion method. Moreover, these parameters need re-optimization for clinical production. The microfluidics technique utilizes vigorous mixing of fluids at a nanoliter scale to produce liposomes in batches from milliliters to a couple liters. The fine control of process parameters results in improved reproducibility between batches. It is inherently scalable; however, the characteristics of liposomes produced by microfluidics both in vitro and in vivo have never been compared to those produced using extrusion. In this manuscript, we describe the comparison between the traditional extrusion method to microfluidics, the new paradigm in liposome production and scale-up.