Liposomes are self-assembled phospholipid vesicles with great potential in drug delivery or fabricating artificial cells. As drugs carriers, liposome has many advantages, such as protecting drugs, improving efficacy, minimizing toxicity, reducing off-target effects, etc., thus liposome fabrication has arouse wide interests. However, there are several issues and concerns of conventional manufacturing techniques for their time-consuming processes, use of costly equipments, poor robustness of parameters, complex pre-and post-processing steps, polydispersity, and batch-to-batch inreproducibility. As a result, microfluidics-based techniques have been developed for liposome fabrication. It has been demonstrated that microfluidic techniques offer a range of advantages compared to conventional methods, especially the ability of precise control over the size and polydispersity of liposomes. This review focuses on recent development of microfluidic techniques with comparison of their outcomes of liposome fabrication. The bottlenecks of microfluidic techniques for liposome fabrication are discussed, and the future development for this field is also prospected.
Contents
1 Introduction
2 Microfluidic hydrodynamic focusing
3 Pulsed jetting
4 Droplet microfuluidics
4.1 Double emulsion templates
4.2 Droplet emulsion transfer
5 Other microfluidic methods
6 Conclusion and outlook