Particle Engineering Takes Center Stage as Journal Opens Call for Translational Drug Formulation Research

The Journal of Pharmaceutical Investigation has announced a special issue devoted to translational advances in pharmaceutical dosage form development, with a focus on particle engineering and formulation science. The issue, tentatively titled Translational Advances in Pharmaceutical Dosage Form Development Based on Particle Engineering and Formulation Science, is scheduled for publication in January 2027, and the submission deadline has been set for June 30, 2026. The announcement positions the special issue at the intersection of laboratory-scale innovation and commercial drug product manufacturing, a space where many promising molecules historically fail to make the leap from bench to bedside.

The issue is being assembled by three guest editors based in South Korea, each of whom brings a distinct institutional perspective to the project. Sung-Joo Hwang of Yonsei University, Min-Soo Kim of Pusan National University, and Heejun Park of Duksung Women’s University will jointly oversee the peer-review process and the curation of accepted contributions. Their combined expertise spans pharmaceutics, formulation technology, and drug delivery, reflecting the breadth of the topics the issue is intended to cover. The editorial team is soliciting original research and review contributions across six thematic areas, ranging from particle-level manipulation of active pharmaceutical ingredients to the regulatory and manufacturing frameworks that govern modern drug product development.

The first thematic pillar concerns particle engineering approaches for solubility, stability, and bioavailability enhancement. This area addresses one of the most persistent bottlenecks in modern pharmacology: a large proportion of drug candidates emerging from discovery pipelines are poorly soluble in water, which limits how much of an administered dose can actually reach the bloodstream. Particle engineering offers a family of physical strategies to overcome this limitation. By reducing particle size to the micrometer or nanometer scale, formulators dramatically increase the surface area available for dissolution, allowing solid drug particles to dissolve faster and more completely in gastrointestinal fluids. Techniques such as wet milling, high-pressure homogenization, spray drying, and supercritical fluid processing are central to this effort, each producing particles with characteristic size distributions, morphologies, and surface properties that in turn govern dissolution rate and oral absorption.

Beyond simple size reduction, particle engineering encompasses the deliberate manipulation of the solid state of a drug substance. Many active pharmaceutical ingredients can exist in multiple crystalline forms, known as polymorphs, as well as in amorphous, non-crystalline states. These different forms can differ substantially in thermodynamic stability, dissolution behavior, and physical robustness. Amorphous solid dispersions, in which a drug is molecularly dispersed in a polymeric carrier, have become a workhorse strategy for enhancing apparent solubility, but they introduce their own challenges, including the risk that the drug will recrystallize during storage and lose its solubility advantage. The special issue’s emphasis on solid-state characterization and control speaks directly to this problem, inviting work on analytical methods such as powder X-ray diffraction, differential scanning calorimetry, and spectroscopic techniques that allow scientists to detect and quantify subtle changes in a drug’s physical form throughout development and on the shelf.

The second major pillar of the call covers advanced formulation strategies for pharmaceutical dosage forms and advanced drug delivery systems. The scope here is deliberately broad, spanning oral, injectable, inhalable, and transdermal routes, among others. Each route imposes its own physical and biological constraints. Oral dosage forms must survive the acidic environment of the stomach and release their payload at the right location in the intestine; injectable formulations must be sterile, isotonic, and free of particles that could trigger immune reactions; inhalable products depend on aerodynamic particle sizes typically in the range of one to five micrometers to deposit in the deep lung; and transdermal systems must drive molecules across the skin’s formidable barrier layer. Formulation science responds to these constraints with technologies such as controlled-release matrices, lipid nanoparticles, self-emulsifying systems, and engineered crystals, and the special issue invites contributions that push these platforms toward clinical and commercial reality.

A third focus area, translational formulation science and scale-up of drug products, addresses the often underestimated gap between a formulation that works in a laboratory beaker and one that can be manufactured reproducibly at industrial scale. A process that produces elegant nanoparticles on a milliliter scale may behave very differently when run through continuous manufacturing equipment at thousands of liters per hour. Mixing efficiency, heat transfer, drying kinetics, and material flow properties all change with scale, and small differences in processing conditions can alter the critical quality attributes of the final product. Translational formulation science seeks to identify which formulation variables are robust to scale-up and which are fragile, and to design processes that maintain product quality across scales. This is where formulation research meets chemical engineering, and contributions that bridge the two disciplines are explicitly within the scope of the issue.

Emerging manufacturing technologies form another pillar of the call. The pharmaceutical industry has been gradually adopting continuous manufacturing, in which raw materials flow through an integrated sequence of unit operations rather than moving in discrete batches, offering tighter process control and smaller facility footprints. Additive manufacturing, commonly known as three-dimensional printing, has opened the possibility of dosage forms with complex internal geometries and, in principle, patient-specific doses. Hot-melt extrusion, electrospinning, and microfluidic production of nanoparticles likewise represent technologies that have matured from academic curiosities into tools with industrial relevance. The special issue’s inclusion of emerging manufacturing technologies signals an interest in work that demonstrates not only that a new process can make a good product in the laboratory, but that it can do so reliably, economically, and in compliance with regulatory expectations.

The final thematic area, applications of Quality by Design and Process Analytical Technology, connects the scientific content of the issue to the regulatory philosophy that now shapes pharmaceutical development worldwide. Quality by Design, often abbreviated as QbD, is a paradigm in which product and process understanding is built systematically: developers identify the quality attributes that matter to patients, determine the formulation and process variables that control those attributes, and establish a design space within which the product will reliably meet its specifications. Process Analytical Technology, or PAT, supplies the real-time measurement tools that make this vision practical, using in-line and at-line sensors such as near-infrared spectroscopy and Raman spectroscopy to monitor critical parameters during manufacturing rather than relying solely on end-product testing. Together, QbD and PAT shift quality assurance from inspection after the fact to control during production, and the special issue invites studies that apply these frameworks to formulation and manufacturing problems.

The timing of the call reflects broader currents in the pharmaceutical sciences. As drug discovery increasingly yields large biological molecules, poorly soluble small molecules, and complex modalities that resist conventional tableting or vial filling, the discipline of formulation science has moved from a supporting role to a decisive one. A molecule with excellent pharmacological activity can be clinically useless if it cannot be delivered at an effective dose in a stable, manufacturable, and patient-acceptable form. Conversely, clever particle engineering and formulation design have repeatedly rescued candidates that would otherwise have been abandoned, extending product lifecycles and enabling new routes of administration that improve patient adherence. By framing the special issue around translational advances, the guest editors are emphasizing this bridging function: the movement of particle-level insight through formulation development, scale-up, and regulatory approval to products that reach patients.

For researchers working in pharmaceutics, the announcement establishes a clear timeline and a defined scope. Submissions are due by June 30, 2026, with the issue itself slated for January 2027, allowing roughly six months for peer review and revision. The six listed topics, spanning particle engineering, advanced dosage forms, solid-state control, translational scale-up, emerging manufacturing, and QbD and PAT applications, collectively map the technical terrain of contemporary drug product development. Prospective contributors are directed to the journal’s announcement page for the full call details and contact information for the guest editors. As the pharmaceutical industry confronts an increasingly difficult pipeline of molecules and rising expectations for manufacturing flexibility and quality, the kind of integrated, translationally minded work this issue seeks to publish is likely to shape how the next generation of medicines is designed, made, and delivered.

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

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

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Keywords: particle engineering, formulation science, drug delivery, bioavailability, solid-state characterization, scale-up, continuous manufacturing, Quality by Design, Process Analytical Technology, dosage forms, pharmaceutics, special issue