Electrospinning and its potential in fabricating pharmaceutical dosage form

Electrospinning is a technique to generate fibrous structures through elongation of electrified jets with an external electric field. Its versatility produces fibres that are being utilised in a diverse field, namely tissue engineering, wound dressings, and controlled drug delivery. Electrospinning has been reported to be useful for Biopharmaceutics Classification System (BCS) of Class II or Class IV drugs, and heat sensitive biomaterials (proteins and enzymes) due to its potential to improve the solubility, dissolution rate, bioavailability, and stability as a heat free and scalable production method. Despite the potential and benefits shown in many reported literatures, there are only limited pharmaceutical products manufactured with this technique in the market. The issues could be two folds. Firstly, electrospinning is capable of producing solid dispersion, a product that is well-known to be inherently unstable at physical state, due to its ultrafast drying mechanism. Secondly, many researchers delineate the advantages of electrospinning in the lab scale setting, which is the main gap in knowledge transfer and causes limited industrial buy-in. Therefore, the current review covers types of electrospinning methods and the used needles, which exposes the reader to the scalable potential of electrospinning. This is specifically scrutinised in order to open the translational potential of electrospinning into the pharmaceutical dosage form aspect. Further review was made on advanced formulation, compositions, as well as concern and consideration of electrospinning in the development of a useful pharmaceutical product. With that, the significant parameters affecting electrospinnability are depicted. The employed carriers, actives, and excipients in the explored formulations are also highlighted. At the end of this review paper, the potential next generation dosage forms derived from electrospinning, namely oromucosal films, minitablets, capsules, patches, scaffolds, and suppositories at laboratory scale were also presented.