Liposome Production with Thin-Film Hydration

Seattle Genova has spent years developing liposome technologies, and our extensive experience qualifies us as experts in liposome preparation and manufacturing. Our liposome platform's goal is to provide you with high-quality liposome services ranging from custom liposome production, analysis, and characterization to application.

Liposomes are practically a subtype of nanoparticles containing a hydrophobic tail and a hydrophilic head comprising a phospholipid membrane. The spherical or multilayered spherical structures of liposomes are highly rich in lipid contents with multiple criteria for their classification, containing structural features, structural parameters, and size, synthesis methods, preparation, and drug loading.

Despite different liposomal applications, such as drug, vaccine/gene delivery, biosensors fabrication, diagnosis, and food products applications, their usage encounters many limitations due to physico-chemical instability as their stability is energetically affected by the constituting components wherein cholesterol performs a a crucial role in the stability of the liposomal membrane. It has well specified that cholesterol exerts its impact by controlling fluidity, permeability, membrane strength, elasticity and stiffness, transition temperature (Tm), drug retention, phospholipid packing, and plasma stability.

Process

The most popular and straightforward way for making MLV is through the thin-film hydration process, which involves dissolving phospholipids in organic solvents such dichloromethane, chloroform, ethanol, and chloroform-methanol mixture (2:1, 9:1, and 3:1, respectively). When solvent evaporates under vacuum at a temperature between 45 and 60 oC, a thin, homogenous lipid layer is created. In order to totally eliminate the remaining solvent, nitrogen gas is used. In the hydration process, a mixture of distilled water, phosphate buffer, phosphate saline buffer with a pH of 7.4, and regular saline buffer is utilized. At a temperature of 60–70 oC, the hydration process took between one and two hours. The liposomal suspension must spend the night at 4 oC to fully hydrate the lipids.

The major drawbacks of the method are associated with low encapsulation, the difficulty of scaling up, and the size distribution being heterogeneous.

Features of our Liposomes Custom Services:

• Non-toxicity, biocompatible, and completely biodegradable

• Rising drug efficacy

• Site avoidance effect

• Improving stability

• Lessening the toxicity of drugs

• Flexibility for active targeting

What Can We Do?

• Different kinds of liposome-based drug delivery systems

• Controlled/sustained release drug delivery system

• Pre-formulation, formulation feasibility and prototype development

• A mixture of mature preparation technologies are available

• Different identification and standardization methods

• Procedure optimization (experimental design) and aseptic filtration

References

1.       Agrawal M. M., Jawade S., Khan S. (2012). A Review on Liposome. Int. J. Adv. Res. Pharm. Bio Sci. 2 (1), 453–465.

2.       Ohring, Milton (2002). Materials science of thin films : deposition and structure (2nd ed.). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.