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Advances in fabricating double-emulsion droplets and their biomedical applications

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Abstract

Double-emulsion droplets have found widespread applications in various engineering and biomedical fields because of their capability in encapsulating different components in each layer. The conventional double-emulsion method is the two-stage stirring emulsification method, which suffers from poor monodispersity and low encapsulation efficiency. With recent advances in microfabrication, some novel methods for fabricating double-emulsion droplets have been developed, including microfluidic emulsification (double-T-junction microchannel, double-cross-shaped microchannel and several three-dimensional microchannels), membrane emulsification and coaxial electrospraying. These methods have shown significantly improved droplet features (e.g., size, size uniformity, thickness of each layer, generation throughput capability). Herein, this paper first reviews the state-of-art approaches for fabricating double-emulsion droplets and discusses their advantages and disadvantages. The applications of double-emulsion droplets in biomedical fields, including cell encapsulation, drug delivery and controlled release, and synthetic biology are also discussed. In conclusion, future perspectives are given.

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Acknowledgments

This work was partially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (11372243, 51476128), the International Science and Technology Cooperation Program of China (2013DFG02930) and the National Key Scientific Apparatus Development of Special Item (2013YQ190467).

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  1. State Key Laboratory of Multiphase Flow in Power Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, 710049, People’s Republic of China

    DaoTong Chong, XinShi Liu, HuaJie Ma & JunJie Yan

  2. Bioinspired Engineering and Biomechanics Center (BEBC), Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, 710049, People’s Republic of China

    DaoTong Chong, XinShi Liu, HuaJie Ma, GuoYou Huang, Yu Long Han, XingYe Cui & Feng Xu

  3. The Key Laboratory of Biomedical Information Engineering of Ministry of Education, School of Life Science and Technology, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, 710049, People’s Republic of China

    GuoYou Huang, Yu Long Han, XingYe Cui & Feng Xu

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  1. DaoTong Chong
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Correspondence to Feng Xu.

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Chong, D., Liu, X., Ma, H. et al. Advances in fabricating double-emulsion droplets and their biomedical applications. Microfluid Nanofluid 19, 1071–1090 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10404-015-1635-8

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