Electrospinning has rapidly progressed over the past few decades as an easy and versatile way to fabricate fibers with diameters ranging from micrometers to tens of nanometers that present unique and intricate morphologies. This has led to the conception of new technologies and diverse methods that exploit the basic electrohydrodynamic phenomena of the electrospinning process, which has in turn led to the invention of novel apparatuses that have reshaped the field. Research on revamping conventional electrospinning has principally focused on achieving three key objectives: upscaling the process while retaining consistent morphological traits, developing 3D nanofibrous macrostructures, and formulating novel fiber configurations. This review introduces an extensive group of diverse electrospinning techniques and presents a comperative study based on the apparatus type and output. Then, each process's advantages and limitations are critically assessed to identify the bona fide practicability and relevance of each technological breakthrough. Finally, the outlook on future developments of advanced electrospinning technologies is outlined, with an emphasis on upscaling, translational research, sustainable manufacturing and prospective solutions to current shortcomings.

Recently, electrospinning (ES) of fibers has been shown to be an attractive strategy for drug delivery. One of the main features of ES is that a wide variety of drugs can be loaded into the fibers to improve their bioavailability, to enhance dissolution, or to achieve controlled release. Besides, ES is a continuous technology with low energy consumption, which can make it a very economic production alternative to the widely used freeze drying and spray drying. However, the low production rate of laboratory‐scaled ES has limited the industrial application of the technology so far. This article covers the various ES technologies developed for scaled‐up fiber production with an emphasis on pharmaceutically relevant examples. The methods used for increasing the productivity are complied, which is followed by a review of specific examples from literature where these technologies are utilized to produce oral drug delivery systems. The different technologies are compared in terms of their basic principles, advantages, and limitations. Finally, the different downstream processing options to prepare tablets or capsules containing the electrospun drug are covered as well.This article is categorized under: Therapeutic Approaches and Drug Discovery > Emerging Technologies

Innovation in the pharmaceutical industry has been limited for a long time to the research and development of new active compounds; meanwhile, the structure of the production, dominated by batchwise technologies, has not changed to date. As has already been demonstrated in several other industrial sectors, continuous manufacturing (CM) has many advantages over batch processes. Faster, cheaper, and more flexible production can be developed with a significantly higher level of quality assurance. In the recent years the main regulatory agencies recognized the need for a change in drug production and started to promote continuous technologies and encourage pharmaceutical companies to develop and adapt such processes. As a result, by today extensive research was conducted in the various fields of pharmaceutical technologies from drug substance to drug product manufacturing. Many publications deal with synthetic steps carried out in flow reactors and crystallizations implemented in a continuous manner, and on the formulation side continuous filtration, drying, granulation, and blending have all been studied to a lesser or greater extent. Moreover, besides the modification of these traditional processes to continuous operation, novel, intrinsically continuous technologies are being studied as well. In order to entirely exploit the advantages of CM, the mainly separately developed processes need to be integrated to form end-to-end systems from the raw materials to the final dosage forms. However, even the integration of two technological steps is a challenging task. The development of end-to-end systems requires deep process understanding and a holistic approach toward process development and optimization. The aim of this work is to give insight into the state-of-the-art and new directions in integrated continuous pharmaceutical technologies by critically reviewing the recent literature of the broad field.