Microfluidic Synthesis of Lipid-Polymer Hybrid Nanoparticles for Targeted Drug Delivery

Lipid-polymer hybrid nanoparticles (LPHN) have great potential as drug delivery devices for treatment of serious medical issues such as cardiovascular disease, tuberculosis, and cancer. Nanoprecipitation is a commonly used method to synthesize LPHN in a low cost manner. However, this multi-step process proves to be difficult in consistently producing uniformly sized nanoparticles. Here we developed a microfluidic device that utilizes a three-channel pathway and mixer channel to synthesize uniformly sized LPHN in a controlled manner. Dynamic light scattering results of the microfluidic synthesized nanoparticles show decrease in diameter size from 140 nm to 40 nm as the Reynolds number of the channel inflow increases. Transmission electron microscopy confirms the size and morphology of the nanoparticles. Three dimensional structure of the LPHN were observed using atomic force microscopy. The production of higher quality nanoparticles using our microfluidics device can expedite the research and development process of drug delivering lipid polymer nanoparticles.