IN FLOW, supporting formulation, characterisation and engineering of biochemical products

The Interreg project IN FLOW aims to support the uptake of flow technology in the production of health and personal care products. An open platform and pilots will help Euregio-based companies get ready for market-testing.

Context

Present-day technologies for the formulation and encapsulation of medicines or cosmetics are implemented through batch working. But the energy costs are often high (heat and mass transfer, inspection devices, etc.), the waste generated is sometimes much greater than the synthesised products and there are considerable quantities of consumed reagents. Furthermore, some reactions cannot quite simply be adapted on an industrial scale, because of the technical limitations imposed by batch systems. Consequently, the scaling-up methodology consisting of taking up reactions developed in a laboratory to adapt them on a production scale is sometimes not an effective solution.

By contrast, microfluidics, which is based on the manipulation and the control of fluids in small volumes but in a continuous flow, ensures constant quality of phenomena, very short interaction times, low reaction volumes, accurate monitoring of conditions combined with energy and resource savings. In addition, this approach offers the possibility of parallelising reactors and using a numbering-up strategy. Consequently, what has been validated in a module will work in 1,000 or 10,000 with no new effects. The transition from the R&D stage to mass-production is therefore no longer a problem.

Goals

The goals of the IN FLOW project is to study new encapsulation formulations and techniques for fast and inexpensive packaging of medicines or cosmetics under continuous flow conditions.
An open technology platform will be set up, including technology, protocols and formulations from the IN FLOW portfolio. All the equipment and installations necessary for the production and validation of the final product will be made available for collaboration with companies, during and after the execution of the project via this platform.

Approach

Nowadays, many formulations for wellbeing and healthcare are composed of active ingredients (perfumes, vitamins, medicines, insecticides, etc.) encapsulated in a support material to form particles of 50 nm to 500 μm.
The role of this enrobing process is to protect the active ingredients, increase their solubility and monitor their delivery. Effective materials are available but it is necessary to develop formulations tools that must be able to be industrialised.
The “IN FLOW” approach consists in integrating the synthesis of monomers, the synthesis of support materials and formulation with active ingredients into a continuous-flow process within a scalable platform.
A steering committee composed of industrialists is monitoring the project and defines the demonstrators. R&D is based on 7 trajectories defined and managed in the Advisory Board (AB) composed of project partners and SMEs (see the official project website for more details). The methodologies applied will allow companies to create new products with high potential for, among others, the health care and personal care industries.