Pharmaceutical Scientists Rally Around Particle Engineering in New Special Issue Push

The Journal of Pharmaceutical Investigation has announced a special issue devoted to translational advances in pharmaceutical dosage form development based on particle engineering and formulation science, with a tentative publication date of January 2027. The call for papers, led by three guest editors based in South Korea, invites researchers from academia and industry to submit work that bridges the persistent gap between laboratory-scale formulation discoveries and commercially manufactured drug products. The submission deadline has been set for June 30, 2026, giving formulation scientists, process engineers, and analytical chemists roughly a year and a half to prepare manuscripts for consideration.

The special issue is being curated by Sung-Joo Hwang of Yonsei University, Min-Soo Kim of Pusan National University, and Heejun Park of Duksung Women’s University. All three institutions are well established in Korean pharmaceutical research, and the editorial team’s combined focus spans drug delivery systems, physical pharmacy, and formulation technology. Their invitation is explicitly framed around translation, a word that carries particular weight in dosage form science, where an elegant nanosuspension or a promising amorphous dispersion in a beaker must ultimately survive mixing, granulation, tableting, coating, packaging, and regulatory scrutiny at industrial scale.

At the heart of the announced scope are particle engineering approaches aimed at enhancing solubility, stability, and bioavailability. This triad of properties defines much of modern formulation science. A large proportion of drug candidates emerging from discovery pipelines fall into Biopharmaceutics Classification System classes II and IV, meaning they dissolve poorly in gastrointestinal fluids even when their intrinsic pharmacology is excellent. Particle engineering attacks the problem at its physical root: by reducing particle size into the micron or nano range, formulators increase the surface area available for dissolution, and by manipulating crystal habit, polymorphic form, or surface energetics, they can alter how quickly and completely a drug leaves its solid state and enters solution.

The techniques grouped under this umbrella are diverse. Wet milling and high-pressure homogenization generate nanocrystals stabilized by surfactants or polymers that prevent aggregation. Spray drying and supercritical fluid processing can lock a drug into an amorphous solid dispersion, where molecules are trapped in a glassy polymer matrix with no ordered lattice to overcome during dissolution. Controlled crystallization can select the thermodynamically stable polymorph, protecting a product from the dreaded scenario of a metastable form converting on the shelf and silently changing dissolution behavior. Each of these interventions carries trade-offs between dissolution advantage and physical stability, which is precisely why solid-state characterization and control form another pillar of the special issue’s topic list.

Solid-state science has become one of the most technically demanding areas of pharmaceutical development. Differential scanning calorimetry, powder X-ray diffraction, dynamic vapor sorption, and spectroscopic methods such as Raman and solid-state NMR allow scientists to fingerprint the crystalline form, residual moisture, and molecular mobility of a powder blend. The special issue’s call for work on solid-state characterization and control reflects a regulatory and scientific consensus that knowing the solid state is not optional: a tablet’s dissolution profile, mechanical strength, and shelf life all trace back to the arrangement of molecules within its particles. Manuscripts that demonstrate how characterization data feed forward into process decisions are likely to sit squarely within the editors’ intent.

Beyond the solid state, the announced topics extend to advanced formulation strategies across essentially every route of administration: oral, injectable, inhalable, transdermal, and other delivery systems. Each route imposes its own constraints. Oral dosage forms must survive gastric acid and enzymatic attack before releasing their payload. Injectable formulations face strict requirements for sterility, isotonicity, and the absence of particulate matter that could embolize capillary beds. Inhaled products demand particle aerodynamic diameters in a narrow window, roughly one to five micrometers, so that droplets or dry powder particles deposit in the deep lung rather than being exhaled or trapped in the throat. Transdermal systems must coax molecules across the stratum corneum, the skin’s remarkably effective lipid barrier. The breadth of this topic signals that the editors welcome contributions from the full spectrum of delivery science rather than a single modality.

Perhaps the most consequential theme in the call is translational formulation science and the scale-up of drug products. Scale-up is where many technically sound formulations fail. A mixing process that works in a two-liter bowl may produce different shear and temperature histories in a two-hundred-liter vessel, changing granule porosity, blend uniformity, or the degree of amorphous character in a dried intermediate. Drying kinetics, compression force profiles, and spray parameters all shift with equipment size, and subtle changes in any of them can move a product outside its proven acceptable range. Work that documents how a formulation was carried from bench to pilot to commercial scale, with the analytical evidence to show that critical quality attributes were preserved, addresses one of the most expensive failure modes in pharmaceutical manufacturing.

Closely related is the special issue’s emphasis on emerging manufacturing technologies in dosage form design and commercial production. Continuous manufacturing has moved from concept to regulatory reality in recent years, replacing batch-by-batch production with integrated trains in which powder feeding, blending, granulation, drying, and tableting run as a single flow process. Additive manufacturing, including various 3D printing platforms, offers the possibility of dosage forms with complex internal geometries or personalized doses. Hot-melt extrusion, electrospinning, and microfluidic crystallization each provide new levers for controlling particle and product architecture. The editors’ inclusion of commercial production in this topic makes clear that they are seeking not just laboratory novelties but technologies with a credible path to the factory floor.

The final announced topic, applications of Quality by Design and Process Analytical Technology in formulation and manufacturing, ties the entire issue together. Quality by Design, or QbD, is the regulatory philosophy that quality should be built into a product through systematic understanding of how formulation variables and process parameters affect critical quality attributes, rather than tested in at the end. Process Analytical Technology, or PAT, supplies the real-time measurement tools that make this possible: near-infrared probes monitoring blend uniformity inside a blender, Raman spectroscopy tracking polymorphic conversion during drying, and laser diffraction verifying particle size distribution in a milling line. Together, QbD and PAT transform formulation development from an empirical craft into an engineering discipline with defined design spaces and control strategies, and manuscripts demonstrating such frameworks in practice align directly with the issue’s translational mandate.

For researchers considering submission, the practical parameters are straightforward. Manuscripts are due by June 30, 2026, with the issue tentatively scheduled for January 2027 in the Journal of Pharmaceutical Investigation. The guest editors, Sung-Joo Hwang, Min-Soo Kim, and Heejun Park, have framed the scope broadly enough to encompass fundamental particle science, applied formulation work, analytical methodology, and manufacturing innovation, provided that each contribution speaks to translation. In an era when drug pipelines are increasingly populated by poorly soluble molecules, biologics requiring sophisticated delivery devices, and personalized therapies demanding flexible manufacturing, the questions this special issue poses are not academic. How a molecule is engineered into particles, how those particles become a dosage form, and how that dosage form is manufactured reproducibly at scale determine whether a therapeutic concept ever reaches a patient. The editors’ call is, in effect, an invitation to document the state of that journey as it stands in the middle of this decade.

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, bioavailability, solid-state characterization, scale-up, Quality by Design, Process Analytical Technology, pharmaceutical manufacturing, dosage forms, Journal of Pharmaceutical Investigation, special issue