Continuous manufacturing of carboxyamidotriazoleencapsulated nanoemulsions using adaptive focused acoustics: Potential green technology for the pharmaceutical industry

Abstract

Nanoemulsions containing hydrophobic drugs have a great potential in the pharmaceutical industries to improve thebioavailability of the drug. However, currently there is no cost-effective way of producing nanoemulsions in large scale.The need of subjecting emulsions to an extreme pressure of 50 MPa demands a large excess of energy for themanufacturing process, while low-energy method requires large amount of solvents. Here, nanoemulsions containing awell-characterized hydrophobic drug, carboxyamidotriazole (CAI), are produced in both batch and continuous modes todemonstrate the scalability of nanoemulsion production using Covaris’ Adaptive Focused Acoustics™ (AFA) technology.To move from batch scale to continuous flow, the acoustic and thermal energy inputs can be manipulated to adjust particlesize, while the composition and temperature of starting materials can be altered to achieve complete dissolution ofhydrophobic drugs, thus providing 100% encapsulation efficiency. Furthermore, using two AFA systems in series candrastically enhance the production flow rates, making AFA a competitive means for producing nanoemulsions in thepharmaceutical industry.