PhD Defense by Aghiad Ghazal

We are pleased to announce the PhD defense by Aghiad Ghazal entitled:

Combination of Microfluidics with SAXS for the Investigation of Pharmaceutical Formulations

Supervisors:
Kell Mortensen, Niels Bohr Institute, UCPH
Anan Yaghmur, Dept Pharmacy, UCPH

Assessment Committee:
Bruno Silva, INL International Iberian Nanotechnology Lab., Portugal
Maria Dimaki, DTU Nanotech, Denmark
Lars H Øgendal, Niels Bohr Institute, UCPH (chair)

Summary: Due to the latest advances in both synchrotron X-ray and microfluidics, many research groups became interested in exploiting the advantages of integrating microfluidics on synchrotron X-ray beamlines. Microfluidics makes use of the limited time on the beamline to perform large number of experiments with minimal sample consumption.

Thus, this Ph.D. project focused on combining microfluidics with small angle X-ray scattering (SAXS) techniques for monitoring the early dynamic structural changes of samples occurring at the millisecond to few seconds range. Among the samples investigated were lipid-based, drug nanocarriers (cubosomes and multilamellar vesicles), which proved to have great potentials in different pharmaceutical applications due to their ability to change their internal structure from lamellar to non-lamellar liquid crystalline phase by tuning their lipid compositions.

Aghiad showed, using the combination of microfluidics and SAXS, that these nanocarriers can also change their internal structure from one non-lamellar cubic phase of symmetry Im3m (P-surface) to another cubic phase of symmetry Pn3m (D-surface) on exposure to buffer containing calcium ions in less than 2s.

Moreover, the characterization of in situ formed monodisperse multilamellar vesicles using synchrotron SAXS was also investigated. Aghiad showed that the developed microfluidic systems are also suitable for investigating other samples such as proteins and pharmaceutical solids.