Pharm. Silke Henry obtained her master in drug development in 2018 at Ghent University. For the honours programme in life sciences in 2016, she evaluated the antibiotic susceptibility of multispecies biofilms with varying community composition. For her master’s thesis in 2017, she developed actively targeting paramagnetic micelles at the University of Turin. In 2018, she started her PhD research concerning the development of local drug delivery systems for long-term sustained release utilizing the hot melt extrusion technique.
Summary of Research Project(s)
Hot melt extrusion (HME) is a versatile, continuous production technique offering numerous advantages over traditionally applied manufacturing processes. In the plastic and food industry, the technique is already well-established. In the pharmaceutical industry however, it is a rather new approach to develop drug products.
An interesting and innovative additive manufacturing process of HME is fused deposition modelling (FDM). This technique enables the production of various 3D printed objects by deposition and solidification of a melted polymer matrix on a build surface. FDM can be employed to develop personalized dosage forms with higher therapeutic efficacy and safety for the patient. Despite its high potential, FDM still needs optimization of processing conditions and investigation on acceptable feedstock properties to print and develop high quality drug delivery forms. Therefore, the main focus of this doctoral work will be investigating the impact of different processing conditions on the quality and release behaviour of the resulting oral dosage forms, as this is generally accepted as the preferred administration route by patients.
