Microfluidics-enabled particle engineering of monodisperse solid lipid microparticles with uniform drug loading and...

Lipids serve as excellent excipients for drug products. Solid lipid microparticles (SLMs) are relatively underexplored in drug delivery; these particles are conventionally prepared using processes yielding polydisperse size distributions, such as spray congealing or emulsification. In this paper, we demonstrate a microfluidics-enabled process for particle engineering of monodisperse solid lipid microparticles with size and content uniformity. To overcome low solubility, we use a volatile solvent to increase drug loading, making the drug-lipid solution a single phase, enabling identical drug loading across particles. We use microfluidic flow extrusion of the solution to generate uniform drug-loaded SLMs, substantially enhancing monodispersity. This method generalises across three drugs-ibuprofen, 5-methyl-2-[(2-nitrophenyl)amino]-3-thiophenecarbonitrile (ROY), and naproxen, and two lipids-beeswax and hard fat (Suppocire NAI 25A), forming particles of various solid states: amorphous naproxen in crystalline lipids, crystalline ROY in crystalline lipids, and a eutectic mixture of ibuprofen-hard fat. In vitro dissolution studies on the ibuprofen-hard fat SLMs reveal gradual release, fitting the Higuchi model with 50-65% drug released over 72 h. This work expands the drug particle engineering toolbox to enable the formulation of SLMs with high precision in particle size and drug loading. Moreover, the diverse solid-state outcomes enabled by our method makes it applicable to various drugs having different formulation requirements (crystalline/amorphous).