In the paper, Ebrahim TaiediNejad and his colleagues present their research findings—developed at the Institute of Microtechnology (IMT) and the Center for Pharmaceutical Process Engineering (PVZ)—on the optimized clinical use of lipid nanoparticles (LNPs). LNPs are a fundamental delivery technology for mRNA-based vaccines and therapeutics, but producing them with the size homogeneity required for clinical use—while scaling up to industrially relevant quantities—remains a major technical challenge. Conventional microfluidic mixing devices with a single nozzle do produce highly uniform particles, but at throughput rates that are too low for large-scale production. The team’s multi-nozzle LARLM platform solves this problem by evenly distributing the aqueous phase across an array of nozzles for the organic phase, allowing multiple mixing channels to operate in parallel without compromising particle uniformity.
Ebrahim TaiediNejad has been working at the IMT since 2020, where he is pursuing his Ph.D. on the topic “DLS feedback-regulated continuous nanoparticle production.” In 2025, he received the VDE/VDI-GMM Award for a paper published in Scientific Reports. In it, he presents a novel 3-D microfluidic system that enables the continuous and highly efficient production of lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) with controlled particle size and low polydispersity. With this award, which comes with a prize of 2,500 euros, the VDE/VDI Technical Society for Microelectronics, Microsystems, and Precision Engineering honors the best scientific paper in this discipline.
Text: János Krüger