Development of a manual extruder for liposome homogenization

Medications using liposomes are of great interest in pharmaceuticals. They increase the therapeutic index of the drug by enclosing the medicinal substance inside a biocompatible lipid envelope, which releases the solution only in the required area. Such drugs have already shown their effectiveness in the treatment of diseases related to oncology, dermatology, neurology, surgery, etc. To use liposomes for these purposes, it is necessary that their size be in the range from 50 to 200 nm. There are several ways to create vesicles of this size, but mostly they use either ultrasound exposure to a liposome solution or extrusion. The extrusion method is a method that allows to obtain the most homogeneous solution from liposomal particles. For extrusion, a special device – an extruder is required. It is a system that passes a liposomal solution under pressure through a filter with a certain pore size. In this paper, the process of liposome extrusion, types of liposomal extruders are considered and their pros and cons are evaluated, a model of a manual extruder capable of homogenizing up to 20 ml of solution was also developed. Different materials were considered and used for the construction of this device. The inspection of the extruder showed its operability and showed the advantages of using extrusion compared to the ultrasound exposure method.