Tag: self-assembling polymers

Company News: SoluBest – A Solution Solution

– Drug Delivery Partnership with Dr. Reddy´s Announced Today –

Investors and media alike use to think of drug delivery as a boring aspect of today’s biotech and pharma business. However, noting that 40% of marketed drugs have solubility issues that cannot be easily solved and about 70% of compounds in discovery are so insoluble that they do not have adequate and consistent gastrointestinal absorption to ensure efficacy, it is clear that the problem is not trivial.

One can look at the problem also from another angle: take, for example, diclofenac, a widely used drug for the treatment of pain and inflammation. In Germany alone, patients consume about 90 metric tons per year. As about 70% of the drug is excreted unchanged because of poor solubility, this means that each year 63 tons are released into sanitary wastewater and ultimately into the environment, as sewage plants cannot clear it from the water. It is long since known that Diclofenac causes damage to fish gills and kidneys.

Better solubility of drugs means improved bioavailability and less substance necessary for the desired therapeutic effect.

There are numerous physical and chemical approaches to improve solubility, including particle size reduction, drug dispersion, complexation and microemulsions as well as nanotechnology approaches – however most add considerable costs and complexity to manufacturing and do not create novel IP.

Enter SoluBest, a new client of akampion: the company is using self-assembling constructs in which active drug molecules are uniquely interwoven with FDA-approved polymers. Once in the body, these oral, solid-dosage formulations disintegrate into colloidal dispersions, increasing drug solubility and absorption, thus improving the bio-performance of insoluble drugs and nutritional actives. Today, the company disclosed the signing of a drug delivery collaboration with Dr. Reddy’s to develop new, proprietary formulations for the Indian drug giant (see press release).

The main advantages of SoluBest’s technology are two-fold. For one, thanks to the self-assembling property of the polymers, the procedure involves just 2 steps: the preparation of a liquid feed, followed by its spray drying to obtain a solid, oral formulation. As a result, the procedure does not add extra complexity to the manufacturing process. Moreover, each formulation can be protected by composition of matter patents and therefore is ideally suited for life-cycle management.
Once in the body, formulation disintegrates into colloidal dispersions, increasing drug solubility and absorption, thus improving the bio-performance of insoluble drugs and nutritional actives.