Drug microparticles, the packaging pharmaceutical drugs are encapsulated in, can now be made a thousand times faster and to more exact measurements through a microfluidic system engineered by the University of Pennsylvania, the school announced this month.
Common methods of creating these devices – such a spray drying and ball milling – often produce uneven results, said a statement from the university. Penn engineers have developed a microfluidic system where more than 10,000 devices can run on a silicon-and-glass chip that can fit in shirt pocket, the university noted.
"These manufacturing problems mean that an enormous amount of time and money is spent on size reductions," Sagar Yadavali, a postdoctoral researcher at Penn said in a university statement. "That leads to higher costs."
The statement said that by synthesizing the drugs in a network of microscopic channels and chambers, surface tension and drag forces can be finely tuned to generate particles of a consistent size and shape. The flow rates in the past, have proven much too slow – about milliliter-per-hour.
"The bottleneck for increasing the throughput of microfluidics is a fundamental physics problem," team leader David Issadore, assistant professor in the School of Engineering and Applied Science's Department of Bioengineering at Penn said in the statement.
According to Nature.com, microfluidics is the engineering or use of devices that apply fluid flow to channels smaller than one millimeter in at least one dimension. Microfluidic devices can reduce reagent consumption, allow well controlled mixing and particle manipulation, integrate and automate multiple assays, known as lab-on-a-chip, and facilitate imaging and tracking, the website said.
The university said that its researchers solved the problem by separating the devices into two: one component that provides the required pressure drop and another downstream that makes the particles.
"By incorporating high-aspect-ratio flow resistors upstream of each device, we can decouple individual droplet design from the system-level design, which allows us to incorporate any type of microfluidic particle generator we want, and as many as we can fit onto a chip," Yadavali said.
Penn's microfluidic system is currently capable of simple drug packaging, but other, more complicated manufacturing techniques are possible, the university said.
"We are now working to implement additional microfluidic operations onto our chip, including miniaturized versions of solvent extraction, crystallization, and other traditional chemical engineering processes," Issadore said in the statement. "By bringing more of the operations necessary to formulate the drug onto our chip, precise 'designer' microparticle drug formulations can be produced at an industrial scale."
The design created by the Penn team is outlined in the science journal Nature Communications.
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