Liposomes are modern delivery systems for active substances that have been developed to improve the pharmacokinetic properties and thus the bioavailability of active substances. The injection method is one of the methods for the preparation of liposomes with the potential to be transferred to the mass production on an industrial scale. Starting from the latter, the aim of this thesis was to investigate the influence of process parameters on the production of liposomes; their size, size distribution and zeta potential before and after membrane extrusion, using different organic solvents, which are not yet well studied in the literature, for selected excipients.
The solvents were chosen according to the solubility of the liposomal components. The following process parameters were tested: organic phase addition rate, volume of demineralised water, stirring speed at injection and temperature during liposome preparation. The experimental design and data analysis followed the design of experiments method.
Given the solubility of the excipients, we decided to design the experiments using three solvents: methanol, a mixture of methanol and ethyl acetate (1:1 (V/V)), and isopropanol. Statistical analysis revealed that we were unable to determine a model for the effect of process parameters on liposome size for methanol and mixture of methanol and ethyl acetate samples. For isopropanol samples, we obtained a model with 55 % predictability, where the liposome size is influenced by the sample preparation temperature. Since membrane extrusion makes the liposome size uniform, the influence of process parameters is blurred and the model cannot be established. A model for the estimation of the zeta potential of liposomes before and after extrusion is also not possible as the zeta potential value depends on the components of the liposomes. Depending on the process parameters, the solvent residual in the samples varied, being lowest with rapid mixing, high heating temperature, large volume of aqueous phase (only for methanol). According to the experimental results, we also confirmed the reproducibility of the temperature during liposome preparation and the organic phase addition rate.
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