Liposome Drug Release Kinetics Measurement

Effectively controlling the payload release to the target sites has always been a challenge. BOC Sciences provides you with comprehensive in vitro release (IVR) testing to facilitate your liposome pharmacokinetic studies.

Factors Affecting Liposomal Drug Release

• The specific composition and relative proportions of the components in the vesicles (e.g. surfactants can fluidize the membrane, thereby increasing the release rate, while cholesterol can have the opposite effect).
• Vesicle size distribution.
• Lamellarity of liposomes (i.e. faster release from monolayer liposomes).
• Properties of the drug (e.g. molecular weight, lipophilicity and charge).
• The physical state of the drug (e.g. precipitated or solution).
• Release mechanism.
• For inhaled liposome formulations, delivery devices can also affect release rates.

In general, drugs released from liposomes depend on kinetic factors. These mathematical modeling methods can help formula developers optimize liposomes for better results.

What We Provide?

We provide liposome-based drug release kinetics testing services to help customers better understand liposome products and promote your project.

How We Do?

• Using analytical methods to measure drug release in real-time

Includes microfluidic device-based release assays and fluorescence imaging system-based release assays.

This method can distinguish between encapsulated drugs and released drugs in IVR samples. For drugs tagged with fluorescence, the change in fluorescence when released from liposomes due to dequenching can be converted into the drug release rate.

• Measuring drug release using membrane dialysis

Through membrane dialysis, the released drug is physically separated from the encapsulated drug in the IVR blood vessel. The separation methods include chromatography, centrifugation, and filtration. These dialysis-based methods are useful when the rate of release from liposomes is relatively slow compared to the time frame for free drug diffusion across the membrane.

Figure 1: The schematic view of the experimentation setup for measuring the dynamics of drug release of the TSL drug delivery system (Davud Asemani. 2018).

References

1. David Cipolla. et al. Development and Characterization of an In Vitro Release Assay for Liposomal Ciprofloxacin for Inhalation. Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences. 2014; 103(1):314-327.
2. Davud Asemani. et al. In vitro Measurement of Release Kinetics of Temperature Sensitive Liposomes with a Fluorescence Imaging System. Conf Proc IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc. 2018 Jul; 2018:3216–3219.
3. Caitlin Burke. et al. Drug release kinetics of temperature sensitive liposomes measured at high temporal resolution with a millifluidic device. Int J Hyperthermia. 2018 Sep; 34(6):786–794.