Abstract:

Nowadays, monodispersed drug-loaded microspheres have been the focus in the research of stable and controllable releasing from microspheres. Traditional mechanical methods have been used as main techniques for microspheres preparation at present. However, these methods do not give a sufficient control over the microsphere size distribution. Moreover, microspheres prepared by these methods have a low drug-loading efficiency and poor performancefor drug sustained releasing. Microfluidic fabrication has been an ideal approach to prepare monodispersed drug-loading microspheres in recent years, which can control the process of droplet formation by a microfluidic chip with simple operation. Therefore, it has a great advantage in the preparation of drug-loading icrospheres. The review aims to firstly discussing the existing problems of preparing microspheres by conventional methods, followed by giving a brief introduction to the principles of microfluidic technology and methods, and types of microfluidic droplet-formation technology for drug-loaded microspheres fabrication. In conclusion, compared with the conventional methods, microfluidic technology for droplet formation can get good tunability on components with controllable and monodispersed drug-loaded microspheres.

Key words: drug-loaded microsphere, microfluidic droplet technology, microfluidic chip