Microfluidic Technologies for Precise Drug Delivery

There is a current demand for new and more sophisticated drug delivery systems (DDSs) to efficiently deliver therapeutics to the desired tissues, enhance drug formulations, and enable industrial-scale production. Conventional methods of fabrication of DDSs often result in heterogeneous drug formulations, which can ultimately lead to poor therapeutic outcomes and a significant number of side effects. Compared to conventional fabrication methods, microfluidic setups offer various advantages, such as enhanced controllability of material characteristics and precise control over the release profiles of payloads. Microfluidics presents distinctive opportunities for achieving complete control over the production processes of drug delivery carriers, thanks to the miniaturization of the fluidic environment. The highly monodisperse droplets produced with microfluidics serve as valuable templates in preparing various DDSs, including microparticle and nanoparticle (NP) systems of lipid and polymer matrices. This review provides a summary of recent therapeutic applications of novel DDS produced or administered with the aid of cutting-edge microfluidic devices. The covered applications will particularly focus on brain, transdermal, intestinal, and intramuscular drug delivery.