Particle Engineering Takes Center Stage in Push to Translate Drug Formulation Science

A major new special issue of the Journal of Pharmaceutical Investigation is set to spotlight one of the most consequential yet underappreciated frontiers in modern medicine: the science of turning promising drug molecules into medicines that actually work in patients. Titled Translational Advances in Pharmaceutical Dosage Form Development Based on Particle Engineering and Formulation Science, the collection will be published in January 2027, with a submission deadline of June 30, 2026. The issue is being assembled by three guest editors based in South Korea, each of whom brings a distinct area of expertise to a field that sits at the crossroads of chemistry, materials science, engineering, and clinical pharmacology.

The editorial team is led by Sung-Joo Hwang of Yonsei University, joined by Min-Soo Kim of Pusan National University and Heejun Park of Duksung Women’s University. Their combined appointment signals the issue’s central ambition: to bridge the gap between laboratory-scale innovation in particle design and the industrial reality of manufacturing billions of dosage units that must be identical, stable, and therapeutically reliable. In pharmaceutical science, that bridge is often the hardest part of drug development to cross, and it is precisely the territory this special issue intends to map.

The scope of the call for papers is deliberately broad, but it is organized around six thematic pillars. The first is particle engineering approaches aimed at enhancing solubility, stability, and bioavailability. This is arguably the most urgent problem in contemporary drug development. Industry analyses have repeatedly suggested that a large fraction of newly discovered drug candidates, particularly the small molecules emerging from high-throughput screening, are poorly soluble in water. A molecule that cannot dissolve in the gastrointestinal tract cannot be absorbed into the bloodstream, no matter how elegant its mechanism of action may be at the cellular level. Particle engineering attacks this problem at its physical root.

The techniques involved read like a catalog of modern materials manipulation. Micronization reduces drug particles to a few micrometers, increasing the surface area available for dissolution in accordance with the Noyes-Whitney relationship, which holds that dissolution rate scales with surface area. Nanonization pushes further, using wet milling, high-pressure homogenization, or supercritical fluid processing to generate particles in the sub-micrometer range, where the enhanced surface-area-to-volume ratio and increased dissolution pressure described by the Ostwald-Freundlich equation can dramatically improve the apparent solubility of a poorly soluble compound. Amorphous solid dispersion takes a different route entirely, locking the drug molecules in a disordered, high-energy glassy state rather than a stable crystal lattice, so that less energy is required for the solid to dissolve.

Each of these strategies carries trade-offs that make formulation science as much an art of compromise as a search for optimum. Amorphous materials, for example, are thermodynamically driven to recrystallize, which would erase the solubility advantage, so formulators must design polymer matrices that kinetically stabilize the amorphous state over a product’s shelf life, often years at ambient conditions. Nanoparticle suspensions are prone to aggregation according to the classical colloid stability theories of Derjaguin, Landau, Verwey, and Overbeek, demanding careful control of surface charge and steric stabilizers. The special issue’s emphasis on stability alongside solubility reflects this reality: a formulation that works on day one but fails on day seven hundred is not a medicine.

The second thematic pillar covers advanced formulation strategies across the full spectrum of dosage routes, including oral, injectable, inhalable, and transdermal delivery, along with advanced drug delivery systems more broadly. Each route imposes its own exacting constraints. Oral solid dosage forms, still the dominant category worldwide, must survive gastric acid, release their payload at the right site, and be manufacturable by high-speed tableting or encapsulation. Injectable formulations face the harshest purity and sterility requirements in the industry, since they bypass the body’s natural barriers entirely. Inhalable products, such as dry powder inhalers and pressurized metered-dose inhalers, depend on aerodynamic particle size distributions typically in the range of one to five micrometers to deposit drug in the deep lung rather than the throat, a requirement that makes particle engineering not merely helpful but indispensable.

Transdermal systems add another layer of complexity, because the stratum corneum, the outermost layer of the skin, is an extraordinarily effective barrier designed to keep foreign molecules out. Formulators working in this space employ chemical penetration enhancers, microneedle arrays, and adhesive matrix technologies to deliver therapeutic doses through a barrier only a few tens of micrometers thick. The inclusion of these diverse routes in a single issue underscores a point the guest editors appear eager to make: the underlying science of particles, phases, and interfaces is common ground, and advances in one delivery modality frequently illuminate solutions in another.

The third and fourth pillars, solid-state characterization and control, and translational formulation science with scale-up, address the intellectual core of pharmaceutical development. A drug substance can exist in multiple crystalline forms, known as polymorphs, which differ in packing arrangement and therefore in melting point, solubility, dissolution rate, and physical stability. The regulatory and commercial stakes are enormous; a shift in polymorph during manufacturing or storage can alter bioavailability and, in documented historical cases, forced products off the market. Techniques such as powder X-ray diffraction, differential scanning calorimetry, dynamic vapor sorption, and solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy allow scientists to identify exactly which form they have and to monitor whether it persists through every processing step, from spray drying to granulation to compression.

Scale-up is where many elegant laboratory formulations meet their sternest test. A mixing process that works flawlessly in a two-liter bowl may produce a non-uniform blend in a two-thousand-liter vessel, because forces of gravity, cohesion, and shear do not scale linearly. Translational formulation science, as the issue’s title suggests, is the discipline of anticipating these failures through modeling, dimensional analysis, and mechanistic understanding rather than trial and error. The guest editors’ decision to foreground translation signals a desire for submissions that demonstrate not just novel particles or novel formulations, but credible pathways from bench to commercial drug product.

The final two pillars concern manufacturing technology and the quality frameworks that govern it. Emerging manufacturing technologies in dosage form design include continuous manufacturing, in which powder feeding, blending, granulation, and tableting proceed as an uninterrupted flow rather than discrete batch steps, and additive manufacturing approaches such as three-dimensional printing, which can produce dosage forms with geometries and release profiles impossible to achieve by conventional compression. Alongside these, the issue explicitly invites work on Quality by Design, or QbD, and Process Analytical Technology, known as PAT. QbD is a regulatory philosophy, codified in international guidelines, that requires manufacturers to understand and control the design space of their processes rather than merely test finished products. PAT supplies the tools, including near-infrared spectroscopy, Raman spectroscopy, and real-time sensors embedded in production lines, that make such continuous understanding and control possible.

For researchers in pharmaceutics, the timeline is concrete: manuscripts are due by June 30, 2026, for publication in the January 2027 issue. For the wider readership of science journalism, the significance is broader. The molecules that dominate the current development pipeline, including a growing population of poorly soluble small molecules and increasingly complex biologics, will only become medicines if the particle and formulation sciences keep pace. This special issue, and the community it convenes, represents the quiet engineering effort that determines whether a discovery in a journal ever reaches a pharmacy shelf. The Journal of Pharmaceutical Investigation, published by Springer, has positioned the collection as a survey of how that effort is evolving, from the nanometer scale of a single engineered crystal to the industrial scale of a continuous manufacturing line running around the clock. In a decade defined by unprecedented chemical diversity in drug candidates, the humble question of how to get a molecule into the body, reliably and reproducibly, has never mattered more.

Subject of Research: A special issue of the Journal of Pharmaceutical Investigation on translational pharmaceutical dosage form development through particle engineering and formulation science

Article Title: Special Issue: Translational Advances in Pharmaceutical Dosage Form Development Based on Particle Engineering and Formulation Science

Article References: Special Issue: Translational Advances in Pharmaceutical Dosage Form Development Based on Particle Engineering and Formulation Science. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: particle engineering, formulation science, drug delivery, solubility enhancement, bioavailability, solid-state characterization, Quality by Design, Process Analytical Technology, scale-up, pharmaceutical manufacturing, dosage forms, Journal of Pharmaceutical Investigation