We are pleased to announce that our Industrial postdoc Sriram Thoppe Rajendran will talk about “slot-die coating as a versatile technique for microfabrication of buccal patches and oral drug delivery systems” in the Oral Track 4: Microneedles and drug delivery session at the MNE 2022 conference in Leuven.
About Sriram’s work
Oral drug administration is the preferred method due to ease of use and high patient compliance. However, formulation for oral drug delivery is getting increasingly complex as more therapeutic compounds are being considered for oral administration such as peptides, and large macromolecules beyond the traditional small molecular weight compounds. Such new-age therapeutics suffer from poor bioavailability because of complex barriers encountered by the therapeutic molecule in the gastrointestinal (GI) tract. Therefore, it is crucial to design and develop drug delivery systems based on intestinal physiology and the mucosal microenvironment.
Microfabricated oral drug delivery systems have emerged recently as a potential solution for achieving controlled and targeted drug delivery systems. Clean-room-based fabrication techniques are predominantly used to manufacture microfabricated oral drug delivery systems. Nevertheless, most of these fabrication approaches lack the possibility for scale-up with high reproducibility, thus causing a severe bottleneck for in vivo studies during the phase of research and development. Slot-die coating (SDC), a thin film deposition technique, could potentially be considered to bridge this gap by enabling the manufacture of microfabricated oral drug delivery systems. SDC is primarily used to prepare continuous, highly uniform films in the 10-3 to 10-8 m thickness range for various applications such as solar panels, capacitors, window coatings, and battery applications among others.
At MNE 2022 conference, we for the first time demonstrate the suitability of SDC for the microfabrication of buccal patches and oral drug delivery systems, thus promoting a roadmap for scalable continuous manufacturing.