Microfluidics for nano-drug delivery systems: From fundamentals to industrialization

In recent years, owing to the miniaturization of the fluidic environment, microfluidic technol-ogy offers unique opportunities for the implementation of nano drug delivery systems (NDDSs) produc-tion processes. Compared with traditional methods, microfluidics improves the controllability and uniformity of NDDSs. The fast mixing and laminar flow properties achieved in the microchannels can tune the physicochemical properties of NDDSs, including particle size, distribution and morphology, re -sulting in narrow particle size distribution and high drug-loading capacity. The success of lipid nanopar-ticles encapsulated mRNA vaccines against coronavirus disease 2019 by microfluidics also confirmed its feasibility for scaling up the preparation of NDDSs via parallelization or numbering-up. In this review, we provide a comprehensive summary of microfluidics-based NDDSs, including the fundamentals of micro-fluidics, microfluidic synthesis of NDDSs, and their industrialization. The challenges of microfluidics-based NDDSs in the current status and the prospects for future development are also discussed. We believe that this review will provide good guidance for microfluidics-based NDDSs. & COPY; 2023 Chinese Pharmaceutical Association and Institute of Materia Medica, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences. Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

Automated summary

In recent years, microfluidic technology has provided unique opportunities for the production of nano drug delivery systems (NDDSs) due to the miniaturization of the fluidic environment. Microfluidics improves the controllability and uniformity of NDDSs, resulting in narrow particle size distribution and high drug-loading capacity. This review comprehensively summarizes the fundamentals, synthesis, and industrialization of microfluidics-based NDDSs, and discusses the challenges and prospects for future development.