Silicon-Based Piezo Micropumps Enable Fully Flexible Drug Delivery Patterns

Drug release plays a crucial role in drug delivery. While current formulation approaches are capable of coarse-tuning the release profile, their precision and reproducibility are limited by the physicochemical properties of the excipients and active pharmaceutical ingredient (API). Innovative and advanced approaches are urgently needed, especially for site-specific targeting of drugs and to address their pharmacological requirements for optimal therapy. The 5 × 5 × 0.6 mm3 piezoelectric micropump developed by Fraunhofer EMFT was designed to enable precise drug delivery in a low volume format. In this study, we investigated the ability of the micropump to deliver solutions of highly soluble APIs using a wide range of customized pump profiles. Additionally, we examined the ability of the micropump to deliver suspensions containing various defined particle sizes. While results for suspensions indicate that pumping performance is highly dependent on the size and concentration of the suspended particles, results with API solutions demonstrate high precision and reproducibility of release, coupled with maximum flexibility in the release profile of the API. The piezoelectric micropump thus lays the cornerstone in the development of a wide range of innovative drug delivery profiles, enabling customized release profiles to be programmed and thus paving the way to fully personalized medicine.