Large-Scale Production of Liposomes by A Microfluidizer

Liposomes can be produced by a variety of techniques such as sonication, high-pressure homogenization, detergent dialysis, reverse-phase evaporation and ether injection. The Microfluidizer is a high-pressure homogenizer which is capable of making small size multilamellar vesicles. The mean vesicle size of the liposome reduced drastically from 0.64 micron to 0.16 micron after three passes through the Microfluidizer. Additional three passes did not reduce the size further. The polydispersity reduced about 1.25% per pass. The ability to scale up the liposome production from 100 ml to 4000 ml (representing minimal batch sizes for the lab scale and the production scale Microfluidizer) was investigated and found to be satisfactory.