Microfluidic Technologies for Accelerating the Clinical Translation of Nanoparticles
Pedro M. Valencia, Omid C. Farokhzad, Rohit Karnik, Róbert Langer
Abstract
This chapter highlights the advances in microfluidic systems that can synthesize libraries of nanoparticles in a well-controlled, reproducible and high-throughput manner. In fact, translation of nanoparticles to the clinic has been slow compared with small-molecule drugs, with the majority of nanoparticles not even reaching the point of in vivo evaluation, and even fewer reaching clinical trials. Amphiphilic molecules such as block copolymers and lipids can self-assemble into nanoparticles when they experience a change in solvent quality. Similarly, inorganic nanoparticles comprising transition metals such as gold, iron and cadmium, among others, undergo self-assembly where metal solutes nucleate, grow and agglomerate into nanoclusters. Nanoparticles exhibiting promising results in vitro are subsequently evaluated in vivo, which is considerably more expensive and resource intensive, especially in non-human primates. Microfluidics — the science and technology of manipulating nanolitre volumes in microscale fluidic channels — has impacted a range of applications, including biological analysis, chemical synthesis, single-cell analysis and tissue engineering.