Droplet-Templated Antisolvent Spherical Crystallization of Hydrophilic and Hydrophobic Drugs with an in situ Formed Binder

Future foods: Design, fabrication and production through microfluidics

Many delicious foods are soft matter systems with health ingredients and unique internal structures that provide rich nutrition, unique textures, and popular flavors. Obtaining these special properties in food products usually requires specialized processes. Microfluidic technologies have been developed to physically manipulate liquids to produce a broad range of microunits, providing a suitable approach for precise fabrication of functional biomaterials with desirable interior structures in a bottom-up fashion. In this review, we present how microfluidics has been applied to produce gel-based structures and highlight their use in fabricating novel foods, focusing on, among others, cultured meat as a rapidly growing field in food industry. We first discuss the behaviors of food liquids in microchannels for fluidic structure design. Then, different types of microsized building blocks with specific geometries fabricated through microfluidics are introduced, including particles (point), fibers (line), and sheets (plane). These well-defined units can encapsulate or interact with cells, forming microtissues to construct meat products with desirable architectures. After that, we review approaches to scale up microfluidic devices for mass production of the hydrogel building blocks and highlight the challenges associated with bottom-up food production.

Electrolyte-Gated Organic Field-Effect Transistors for Quantitative Monitoring of the Molecular Dynamics of Crystallization at the Solid-Liquid Interface

Quantitative measurements of molecular dynamics at the solid-liquid interface are of crucial importance in a wide range of fields, such as heterogeneous catalysis, energy storage, nanofluidics, biosensing, and crystallization. In particular, the molecular dynamics associated with nucleation and crystal growth is very challenging to study because of the poor sensitivity or limited spatial/temporal resolution of the most widely used analytical techniques. We demonstrate that electrolyte-gated organic field-effect transistors (EGOFETs) are able to monitor in real-time the crystallization process in an evaporating droplet. The high sensitivity of these devices at the solid-liquid interface, through the electrical double layer and signal amplification, enables the quantification of changes in solute concentration over time and the transport rate of molecules at the solid-liquid interface during crystallization. Our results show that EGOFETs offer a highly sensitive and powerful, yet simple approach to investigate the molecular dynamics of compounds crystallizing from water.

Hydrogel Microparticle-Templated Anti-Solvent Crystallization of Small-Molecule Drugs

Conventional formulation strategies for hydrophobic small-molecule drug products frequently include mechanical milling to decrease active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) crystal size and subsequent granulation processes to produce an easily handled powder. A hydrogel-templated anti-solvent crystallization method is presented for the facile fabrication of microparticles containing dispersed nanocrystals of poorly soluble API. Direct crystallization within a porous hydrogel particle template yields core-shell structures in which the hydrogel core containing API nanocrystals is encased by a crystalline API shell. The process of controllable loading (up to 64% w/w) is demonstrated, and tailored dissolution profiles are achieved by simply altering the template particle size. API release is well described by a shrinking core model. Overall, the approach is a simple, scalable and potentially generalizable method that enables novel means of independently controlling both API crystallization and excipient characteristics, offering a "designer" drug particle system.

3D bioprinting of complex tissues in vitro: state-of-the-art and future perspectives

The pharmacology and toxicology of a broad variety of therapies and chemicals have significantly improved with the aid of the increasing in vitro models of complex human tissues. Offering versatile and precise control over the cell population, extracellular matrix (ECM) deposition, dynamic microenvironment, and sophisticated microarchitecture, which is desired for the in vitro modeling of complex tissues, 3D bio-printing is a rapidly growing technology to be employed in the field. In this review, we will discuss the recent advancement of printing techniques and bio-ink sources, which have been spurred on by the increasing demand for modeling tactics and have facilitated the development of the refined tissue models as well as the modeling strategies, followed by a state-of-the-art update on the specialized work on cancer, heart, muscle and liver. In the end, the toxicological modeling strategies, substantial challenges, and future perspectives for 3D printed tissue models were explored.

Recent Progress of Antisolvent Crystallization

Antisolvent crystallization is a significant unit operation in the pharmaceutical industry, especially on drug crystal properties optimization. This paper firstly highlights the applications of antisolvent crystallization in crystal engineering. Antisolvent...