脂质体类药物载体的微流控制备

Microfluidic Fabrication of Liposomes as Drug Carriers

脂质体在药物输送、人造细胞等许多领域有着巨大的应用前景。作为药物载体,脂质体可以保护药物、提高药效、减小药物对机体的毒性、使药物具有靶向性,因此发展或改进脂质体制备方法有着重要的意义。然而,传统的脂质体制备存在耗时长、设备贵、制备条件易变、前后处理步骤多、粒径不均一以及难重复等问题,基于此,脂质体的微流控制备技术逐渐发展起来。研究表明微流控技术在脂质体制备方面有着独特的优势,包括精确地控制脂质体的大小和尺寸分布。本文综述了近年来基于微流控技术的几种脂质体制备方法的研究进展,并对比了几种方法制备的脂质体的性质;进一步分析和探讨了当前微流控技术制备脂质体存在的问题,并展望了其发展趋势和方向。

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.