Nanoscale Liposome Synthesis for Drug Delivery Applications via Ultrafast Acoustofluidic Micromixing

Abstract

Nowadays, lipid nanoparticles have gained profound interest in chemical and biomedical engineering. The rapid development of therapeutic nanosystems has led to a need to design suitable approaches to synthesize bio-carriers for efficient drug delivery. Microfluidic methods provide an excellent opportunity to acquire desirable nanoparticle properties, including stability, size, shape, and size distribution, which are often challenging to obtain using conventional bulk synthesis methods. Rapid mixing is a crucial factor in the nanoprecipitation process as it influences the size and size distribution of the nanoparticles. Within this regard, in this work, we report an ultrafast acoustofluidic micromixer to synthesize liposome nanoparticles, which have been widely investigated in the literature as drug carriers due to their biocompatibility and biodegradability. This research has also investigated the influence of glycerol addition to the solvent to control the size of the liposomes. Our findings indicate that utilizing the acoustofluidic platform resulted in the production of nanoscale liposomes with small mean sizes compared to the hydrodynamic flow-focusing (HFF) method. Furthermore, the inclusion of glycerol led to a significant reduction in liposome size. These results emphasize the potential of the proposed approach for the efficient and precise synthesis of liposome nanoparticles with improved characteristics, which can be utilized in various biomedical and drug delivery applications.