Back

Accelerated mass transfer from frozen thin films during thin-film freeze-drying

Wang, J.-L.; Kuang, M.; Xu, H.; Williams, R. O.; Cui, Z.

2022-04-17 pharmacology and toxicology
10.1101/2022.04.16.488553 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Freeze-drying, or lyophilization, is widely used to produce pharmaceutical solids from temperature-sensitive materials but the process is time and energy inefficient. Herein, using E. coli as a model live organism, whose viability in dry powders is highly sensitive to the water content in the powders, we demonstrated that the drying rate of thin-film freeze-drying (TFFD) is significantly higher than that of the conventional shelf freeze-drying, likely because the large total surface area from the loosely stacked frozen thin films and the low thickness of the thin-films enable faster and more efficient mass transfer during freeze-drying. The highly porous nature and high specific surface area of the thin-film freeze-dried powders may have contributed to the faster mass transfer as well. Moreover, we demonstrated that TFFD can be applied to produce dry powders of E. coli and L. acidophilus with minimum bacterial viability loss (i.e., within one log reduction), and the L. acidophilus dry powder is suitable for intranasal delivery. It is concluded that TFFD technology is promising in addressing the time-and cost-inefficient issue of conventional shelf freeze-drying.

Matching journals

The top 7 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.