title: Microfluidic approach for encapsulation via double emulsions.
abstract: Double emulsions, with inner drops well protected by the outer shells, show great potential as compartmentalized systems to encapsulate multiple components for protecting actives, masking flavor, and targetedly delivering and controllably releasing drugs. Precise control of the encapsulation characteristics of each component is critical to achieve an optimal therapeutic efficacy for pharmaceutical applications. Such controllable encapsulation can be realized by using microfluidic approaches for producing monodisperse double emulsions with versatile and controllable structures as the encapsulation system. The size, number and composition of the emulsion drops can be accurately manipulated for optimizing the encapsulation of each component for pharmaceutical applications. In this review, we highlight the outstanding advantages of controllable microfluidic double emulsions for highly efficient and precisely controllable encapsulation.
authors.affiliation: School of Chemical Engineering, Sichuan University, Chengdu 610065, China.
authors.forename: Wei
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.affiliation: School of Chemical Engineering, Sichuan University, Chengdu 610065, China.
authors.forename: Mao-Jie
authors.initials: MJ
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.affiliation: School of Chemical Engineering, Sichuan University, Chengdu 610065, China; State Key Laboratory of Polymer Materials Engineering, and Collaborative Innovation Center for Biomaterials Science and Technology, Sichuan University, Chengdu 610065, China. Electronic address: chuly@scu.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Liang-Yin
authors.initials: LY
authors.lastname: Chu
mesh_terms: D004339:Drug Compounding / Q000379:methods*; D004655:Emulsions; D044085:Microfluidics
chemical_list: D004655:Emulsions