Drug Delivery
SPECIAL FEATURE - Bioavailability & Solubility: New Approaches to Enhance Drug Performance
Contributor Cindy H. Dubin highlights many of the latest techniques to enhance bioavailability and solubility, how to determine the right technique for your compound, and how some companies are realizing faster time to market as a result.
ORALLY DISINTEGRATING TABLETS - Patient-Centric Dose Design, Developments in Orally Disintegrating Tablets
Leon Grother, MS, and Mathias Bayru, MS, MBA, indicate recent developments in ODT technology have widened the range of actives that can be formulated and product types that are possible. In particular, the promise of formulating biologics and ODT vaccines is hugely exciting.
ADVANCED DELIVERY DEVICES - Disruptive Delivery Technology Partnerships Are Key to Pharmaceutical Life Cycle Management
Michael D. Hooven, MSME, believes in the challenge to deliver innovative therapies that address unmet patient needs while delivering profitable growth, and the industry is responding by embracing disruptive technology that can concurrently help on both fronts and also speed time to market for pharmaceutical products and services.
BIODEGRADABLE FIBERS - Enabling Controlled Pharmaceutical & Biologic Delivery for Next-Generation Medical Applications
Kevin Nelson, PhD, discusses how wet-extruded fiber eliminates the traditional limitations of pharmaceuticals and biologics that may be incorporated into implantable medical devices with melt extrusion or electrospun fibers, microspheres, or nanoparticles.
CNS DELIVERY - Bypassing the BBB: Drug Delivery From the Olfactory Mucosa to the CNS
T.R. Shantha, MD, PhD, FACA, explores and explains how therapeutic and non- therapeutic agents can reach the brain, bypassing through the formidable BBB based on the unique microanatomic and physiologic characteristics of the nasal olfactory mucosal route and its CNS connections that allow transportation directly into the CNS.
COMBINATION PRODUCTS - 6 Guidelines to Follow When Developing Combination Products
Winston Brown explains how companies can reduce the risk and impact that regulatory uncertainty can play by, in advance of pursuing development, understanding the regulatory landscape and then developing a regulatory compliance strategy that is appropriate and suitable for the combination product as a system.
EXECUTIVE INTERVIEW - Insulet Corporation: Improving Adherence Through Wearable, Patient-Centric Drug Delivery
Michael Graffeo, Vice President of Business Development, Insulet Delivery Systems Group, discusses the importance of optimizing patient adherence to ensure improved clinical outcomes.
PLATFORM TECHNOLOGY - The 3DNA® Platform for Targeted Drug Delivery
Robert C. Getts, PhD, and Jessica Bowers review how the 3DNA platform is composed entirely of noncoding DNA assembled through the sequential hybridization of single strands of DNA into a network of double-stranded nucleic acid having a controlled architecture, and multiple attachment sites for drug and targeting molecules.
COMBINATION PRODUCTS - Device Development for Pharmaceutical & Biologic Combination Products
Bill Welch says when developing a combination product, there are many things to be considered – relationships between device development and the pharmaceutical or biologic, early establishment of regulatory and clinical strategies, understanding user needs, determining product requirements, as well as device manufacturing variation.
ADVANCED DELIVERY DEVICES - Sophisticated Connected Wearables: Boosting Biologics’ Compliance, Value & Patient Satisfaction
Michael D. Hooven, MSME, says the new, most advanced wearable large-volume injectors available now for clinical trials and commercial application are designed to address the challenges of formulating biologics, delivery complexity, patient compliance, and cost.
DEVICE STUDY - The Intuitiveness, Ergonomics & Usability of the Credence Companion® Safety Syringe: A Formative Study
John A. Merhige, MEM, and Lisa Caparra, RN, present an informative human factors study to evaluate and assess the intuitiveness, ergonomics, and usability of the Credence Companion® Staked Safety Syringe.
TRAINING DEVICES - Best Practices & Considerations in Developing Effective Training Devices for Injectable Healthcare Markets
Joe Reynolds says training devices are often used to create consistent onboarding experiences for patients through the use of novel technologies and mechanisms that fully simulate the mechanical aspects of the injection experience. And while these devices appear to be fairly simple at first glance, numerous design and engineering challenges must be addressed.
SPECIAL FEATURE - Injectable Drug Delivery: Key Trends Define Device Design Now & in the Future
Contributor Cindy H. Dubin spoke with some of the world’s leading device developers about their current injection technologies and how their devices are addressing the current trends and opportunities in the industry.
SOFTGEL FORMULATIONS - Lipid-Based Drug Delivery System to Bring Poorly Soluble Drugs to Market
Ronak Savla, PhD, PharmD, and Jeffrey E. Browne, PhD, indicate formulation screening, development, scale-up, and commercial manufacture of LBDDSs require considerable expertise, and choosing an outsourcing partner with experience and a proven track record is critical.
ORALLY DISINTEGRATING TABLETS - Designed With Patients in Mind: The Art of Patient-Centric Drug Formulation
Anthony Recupero, PhD, believes by partnering with an expert in drug delivery technology, whose portfolio features a broad range of proprietary technologies, pharmaceutical companies have the potential to add further value to their products and extend market exclusivity.
PHARMACOLOGY MODELS - Early Phase Pharmacodynamic Models for Respiratory Drug Candidates
Robert Lins, MD, PhD, believes classical primary respiratory endpoints are far from successful in exploratory and confirmatory studies, and new techniques being developed have most potential in early phase, exploratory, clinical trials, but there may be the opportunity to apply at least some of them in the later stages of development.
COMBINATION CORNER - Keys to a Robust Combination Product Design Verification & Validation
Lilli Zakarija, MSME, MBA, explains that in order to conduct a successful V&V on the intended combination product, the key is to understand that the V&V testing is not an isolated activity and task.
DELIVERY PLATFORM - Encochleated Drug Formulations: Enhancing Efficacy, Minimizing Toxicity
Roelof Rongen, MBA, MS, indicates drugs for serious fungal and microbial infections currently require IV administration at doses associated with significant toxicity. Orally administered, encochleated formulations of a broad-spectrum of fungicidal and anti-microbial medications may provide delivery of anti-infective drugs at therapeutic levels while minimizing drug-associated side effects.
EXECUTIVE INTERVIEW - DelMar Pharmaceuticals: Polishing NCI Diamonds in the Rough With Modern Science
DelMar Pharmaceuticals, Inc. was founded to develop and commercialize new cancer therapies in indications where patients are failing or have become intolerant to modern targeted…
GLOBAL FORMULATION REPORT - Notable Technologies, Approvals, Transactions, Pipelines & Inflection Points
This Global Formulation Report is a joint initiative by Drug Development & Delivery and PharmaCircle LLC, covering several areas of significant interest in today’s ever-challenging pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries.
What are Drug Delivery Systems?
Drug delivery systems are engineered technologies for the targeted delivery and/or controlled release of therapeutic agents. The practice of drug delivery has changed significantly in the past few decades and even greater changes are anticipated in the near future. Drug delivery includes but is not limited to oral delivery, gene/cell delivery, topical/transdermal delivery, inhalation deliver, parenteral delivery, respiratory delivery, capsules, particle design technology, buccal delivery, etc.
The Evolution of Drug Delivery Systems
Drug delivery systems have greatly evolved over the past 6 decades. In the past 12 years specifically, there have been huge advancements in drug delivery technology. For instance, advanced medication delivery systems, such as transdermal patches, are able to deliver a drug more selectively to a specific site, which frequently leads to easier, more accurate, and less dosing overall. Devices such as these can also lead to a drug absorption that is more consistent with the site and mechanism of action. There are other drug delivery systems used in both medical and homecare settings that were developed because of various patient needs and researchers continue to develop new methods.
Drug Delivery System Market Size
The pharmaceutical drug delivery market size is studied on the basis of route of administration, application, and region to provide a detailed assessment of the market. On the basis of route of administration, it is segmented into oral delivery, pulmonary delivery, injectable delivery, nasal delivery, ocular delivery, topical delivery, and others.
The estimated global market size of drug delivery products was $1.4 trillion in 2020. Unfortunately, 40% of marketed drugs and 90% of pipeline drugs (mostly small molecules) are poorly soluble in water, which makes parenteral, topical, and oral delivery difficult or impossible. In relation, poor solubility often leads to low drug efficacy. Add in the fact that many other hurdles exist in the form of drug loading, stability, controlled release, toxicity, and absorption – it’s not hard to understand the difficulties in bringing new drug products to market. Additionally, biopharmaceuticals (proteins, peptides, nucleic acids, etc) and combination drug products possess many of these same problematic obstacles that affect efficacy. These challenges, coupled with the complexity and diversity of new pharmaceuticals, have fueled the development of a novel drug delivery platforms that overcome a great many bioavailability and delivery obstacles. By leveraging these platforms, pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical companies can improve dosing accuracy, efficacy, and reproducibility in their drug discovery and drug delivery research.
Drug Delivery System Demand
The demand for pharmaceutical products worldwide is only going to increase in the coming years, as old and emerging diseases continue to threaten the well-being of people globally. Drug discovery efforts are expected to intensify, generating a large variety of active compounds with vastly different structures and properties. However, it is well known that despite tremendous output of the drug discovery process, the success rate of a candidate compound becoming an approved drug product is extremely low. The majority of candidate compounds are discarded due to various hurdles in formulation and preclinical testing (such as issues with solubility, stability, manufacturing, storage, and bioavailability) before even entering into clinical studies. Therefore, advances in formulation and drug delivery, especially the development of new and versatile biomaterial platforms as effective excipients, may salvage many “difficult,” otherwise triaged, drug compounds, and significantly enhance their chance of becoming viable products. Furthermore, breakthroughs in biomaterial platform technologies will also facilitate life cycle management of existing APIs through reformulation, repurposing of existing APIs for new indications, and development of combination products consisting of multiple APIs.
