(93ar) Hydrodynamic Formation of Nanoparticles

In the past 10 years significant effort has been put into creating pure drug and drug encapsulated nanoparticles. While many of these laboratory scale efforts have been successful there are very few techniques that can be done on a production scale. High intensity homogenization with a static mixer has been used to make nano-sized lipid particles. This technique involves using an SMX static mixer with an emulsion of melted lipid and water/surfactant. The emulsion is premixed and feed to an injection chamber which then pressurizes the fluid upwards of 2000 psi. The fluid is then quickly discharged through one or more static mixers in series. The hot emulsion stream leaving the static mixer is quenched in a tank of cool water hardening the lipid. Here the nano-particles are collected. Preliminary results by laser diffraction show a means size around 250 nano-meters with a polydispersity of about 0.2.