(133d) Drug Particle Engineering Enabled By Soft Matter Concepts

Advances in modern drug manufacturing have primarily focused on discovery and synthesis of the active pharmaceutical ingredient (API). However, processes to turn this API into the final drug product are often multi-step batch processes that are energy intensive, inflexible and wasteful. For instance, large millimetric crystals are initially formed which are then ground down to sub-micron sizes through energy intensive processes which can damage the API. These small crystals are subsequently blended with a variety of binding and stabilizing excipient materials in a trial and error fashion. Conventional approaches do not allow for independent control over drug loading, crystal properties, or release profiles. In this talk, I will discuss emerging technologies to co-process APIs with excipients using fluidic systems for advanced pharmaceutical manufacturing. The technologies leverage emulsions which serve as a discrete, monodisperse, reaction vessels for solidification of emulsions into solid powders. With these new processes, we can precisely control powder size and morphology, API solid form, crystal size, loading and release profiles. Powders can either be directly loaded into capsules or serve an intermediate drug products that are compacted into tablets. We demonstrate that microfluidic co-processed powders not only have favorable flowability compare to their bulk counterparts but also show favorable compaction properties for tableting compared to API physically blended with excipients.