(20g) Confined Impinging Jet Technology That Enabled COVID Lipid Nanoparticle Production: Engineering Science and History

Mike McDermott, the President of Pfizer Global Supply, in the CNN interview where they took the press through the Pfizer COVID vaccine lipid nanoparticle production process said, “the impingement jet mixer makes it possible.” The confined impinging jet mixer is a technology developed in our laboratory that is based on using turbulence to establish rapid micromixing, high supersaturation, and nanoparticle formation by diffusion limited aggregation. The length scale for diffusion of solvent/antisolvent is based on the Kolmogorov length scale of the turbulence. We will discuss examples of nanoparticle formulations of a wide range of therapeutic drugs based on this nanoparticle formation platform. The scalability of the FNP platform has allowed it to be applied to formulate a wide range of therapeutics from small molecules, peptides, proteins and RNA. The 3 billion doses of Pfizer LNP COVID vaccine were manufactured using our FNP platform. In addition, the technology is being sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to produce low-cost oral formulations of highly hydrophobic compounds for global health. The translation from laboratory research through full scale production will be presented.