Article: Liquid And Semi-Solid Formulations For Enhancing Oral Absorption

By Hassan Benameur, Capsugel

Today, the formulations of poorly water soluble compounds for oral delivery are one of the greatest challenges to scientists in the pharmaceutical industry. In general, formulation scientists are faced with challenging decisions in the development of liquid or semi-solid formulation strategies starting from the selection of excipients, solubility and stability assessments, developments of the formulation prototypes and optimisations, scale-up and finally the production of the drug product. The majority of these formulations are developed by an empirical, trial-and-error approach, with erratic and poor in vitro / in vivo correlations. The following steps will be presented with marketed API’s as model drugs, as well as recently formulated new chemical entities (NCE) to address the development of liquid or semi-solid formulation in a rational way.