Microfluidic Synthesis of Nano-Liposomal Anesthetics

摘要

Topical anesthesia has the ability to provide painless application of pain management medications for minor procedures such as venipuncture, particularly in the pediatric population. Liposomes have been proposed as a highly advantageous nanocarrier for dermal transport of drugs. Unlike conventional liposome preparation methods, which yield polydisperse populations of liposomes which are too large to passively transverse dermal layers (typically >80 nm), the recently developed microfluidic method for liposome synthesis provides an approach for producing nearly-monodisperse vesicles of tunable size which can achieve a range of size not achievable by traditional methods (approximately 40 nm and below). In this study, we have utilized a previously-demonstrated microfluidic method for continuous-flow synthesis of small, nearlymonodisperse liposomes and demonstrated size-dependent passive uptake into porcine dermal tissue.