While a drug’s chemical makeup determines what impact it will have on the body (pharmacodynamics), it is often the shell that it’s encapsulated in that defines how fast the drug will be released, the location of that release, and even how how the release can be triggered externally (pharmacokinetics). Allowing drug designers to tune such different variables will require a way to be very precise in how the microparticles that will serve as the shells for the drugs are manufactured.
At the University of Pennsylvania, researchers have developed tiny devices, which can be strung together with thousands of others just like it, that generate perfectly identical microparticles that have precisely defined characteristics.
Each device is so small that more than ten thousand of them can be placed on a single silicon-glass chip that’s about the size of a DVD.
Study in Nature Communications: Silicon and glass very large scale microfluidic droplet integration for terascale generation of polymer microparticles…
