Ensuring The Greatest Return From Your Poorly Soluble Molecule

By Marshall Crew, SVP Innovation, Thermo Fisher Scientific

Currently, about 70% of new molecular entities (NMEs) exhibit poor solubility in water and require some form of enhancement in order to achieve sufficient bioavailability, leading to tough questions about how to proceed for biopharmaceutical companies developing such compounds.

The sheer number of potential strategies for improving the solubility of a compound — which include various methods of particle size reduction, solid dispersions, salt formation, lipid formulations, inclusion complexes, nanocrystals, and a wide variety of other technologies — can overwhelm many developers, leaving them unsure how to choose a path forward.