Squeezing out ultrafine hydrophobic and poor water-soluble drug particles with water vapour

© 2014 The Society of Powder Technology Japan. Published by Elsevier B.V. and The Society of Powder Technology Japan. All rights reserved. This short communication describes a scalable new method to produce ultrafine hydrophobic or poorly soluble drug particles. Ultrafine Vitamin D3, Aspirin and Ibuprofen particles in the submicron range were produced. The method is an extension of the antisolvent vapour precipitation technique which exposes a droplet to an antisolvent vapour with reference to the dissolved materials within the droplet. In this work, the drug material was dissolved in ethanol droplets and then exposed to a convective stream of water vapour. Absorption of the water vapour into the droplet resulted in the precipitation of the particles. The precipitated submicron particles showed good dispersion behaviour in water droplets. This work will form the basis for using spray dryers as high-throughput scalable micro-precipitators.