An Accessible and Scalable Pipette-Driven Microfluidic Platform for Lipid Nanoparticle Formulation

A pipette-driven disposable microfluidic mixer with a high-shear spiral channel reproducibly forms smaller LNPs with higher mRNA encapsulation efficiency than a low-shear design across three benchmark formulations.

• Why it matters: LNP screening needs accessible, scalable, low-volume methods that reduce reliance on external microfluidic pumps and speed up formulation optimization.
• What they did: The team used a dual-chamber pipette tip to drive a fixed flow-rate ratio mixer, compared high- vs low-shear designs using computational fluid dynamics micromixing-time predictions, and validated performance with orthogonal LNP characterization and mRNA delivery in 2D, 3D human liver tissue, and mice.
• The result: The selected high-shear mixer enabled functional mRNA delivery and, guided by dimensionless mixing-time analysis, scaled to a separate production system producing 75 mL at 150 mL/min with comparable particle size and mRNA encapsulation efficiency.

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