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Focused Ultrasound - A Novel Tool for Liposome Formulation

Liposomes are excellent carriers of active pharmaceutical ingredients and cosmetic agents. Their vesicular structure, housed by lipid bilayers, resembles that of natural cells and is shown in Figure 1. The building blocks of liposomes, i.e. lipids, can be tuned to enhance the bio-availability of an active compound in specific tissues, improve the therapeutic index, and decrease side effects such as toxicity. Clinically, liposomes are already FDA approved for delivering a wide scale of small-molecule drugs, and their development for the delivery of more sophisticated macromolecules, such as DNA, siRNA, proteins and peptides, is being sought by industry and academia. Producing liposomes at the nanoscale is of great interest; current technologies, such as extrusion, high pressure homogenization/ultrasonication, and microfluidic chambers, are either non-suitable for delicate compounds or difficult to scale up. Herein, we describe a novel technology – Adaptive Focused AcousticsTM (AFA ) capable of efficiently producing nano-liposome formulations at the bench or in a pilot plant. The technology eliminates the need to heat the lipids or to dissolve them in a co-solvent during the formulation process. The computer-guided process ensures batch-to-batch repeatability, and the disposable closed flow-system prevents inter-batch contamination and alleviates the need for exhaustive wash cycles.