encapsulation.

They prepared very homogeneous chitosan microspheres containing insulin with very high encapsulation eciency (80%) maintaining insulin chemical stability. More complex matrixes, as the combination of Transcutol HP and dextran, were also produced using SPG membranes to form the droplets including intraconazol (antifungal) [182]. This versatility allows to improve formulations in order to improve both, solubility and availability of the drug of interest. In this way, administration routes for polymeric particles can be expanded [183]. 5.2. Planar microuidic devices Planar microuidic devices based on hydrodynamic methods to form drops have become a very widespread tool to obtain particles in a continuous manner. The rst approaches were focussed on applications with strong needs in miniaturization and process integration. Nevertheless, the fact that they are cheap, disposable, and versatile make them easy to adapt to new applications. Planar microuidic devices are used more and more for microparticle manufacturing, including the production on the nanoscale. As mentioned in Sec. 2, these methods can be grouped into three main classes: cross-owing systems, co-owing streams, and extensional co-ows. We will discuss the application to drug delivery of the two rst ones, and then some examples of planar extensional co-ows will be shown. Nanoscale liposomes, polymersomes, micelles, solid lipid nanoparticles, and polymeric nanoparticles are some of the preferred structures for drug delivery, and all of them have been obtained using microuidic approaches. Micelles and liposomes are the best known types of nanometric particles. Micelles of less than 250 nm have been obtained in continuous-ow microreactors using Pluronic tri-block copolymer [184] as a model of polymeric biomaterial for drug delivery applications. Nanoprecipitation of the micelles is triggered by a solvent exchange process when the organic solutions of the polymer mixed with a non-solvent. On liposome formation by microuidics, the ethanolic solution of lipids is hydrodynamically focused between two sheathed aqueous streams in a microchannel [185]. The liposome formation depends more strongly on the focused alcohol stream width and its diusive mixing with the aqueous stream than on the shear forces at the solventbuer interfaces. The vesicle size and size distribution are tunable over a mean diameter from 50 to 150 nm by adjusting the ratio of the alcohol-toaqueous volumetric ow rate. One of the main application of liposomes is gene delivery. Wi et al. [186] tested the activity in gene delivery by using two 30