Chemicals & raw materials
The patient priority
There’s a good reason that drug formulation is carried out by scientists with at least a master’s degree in chemistry; ingredients can be expensive for a start, but they also have to be balanced in a way that achieves an end goal. For solid oral medications, this can mean the quick and sustained release of chemicals. For liquid forms it can mean attaining a viscosity proportional to the drug concentration. In both cases, the key is the use of excipients, and Mae Losasso speaks to Dr Shazia Bashir, teaching fellow in the School of Cancer and Pharmaceutical Sciences at King’s College London to find out how scientists use them to reach the right balance of ingredients for an effective drug.
“I
f you look at a hard tablet, you wonder how it’s going to break up in the stomach and how the drug is going to work within 20 minutes,”
says Dr Shazia Bashir, teaching fellow in the School of Cancer and Pharmaceutical Sciences at King's College London. It’s not something we tend to think about when we take a drug – how the active ingredients get compacted into a little pill – but it is one of the most fundamental elements of drug formulation and a bedrock of the pharmaceutical industry. So, what is the magic that makes this alchemy possible? The answer, in a word, is excipients.
World Pharmaceutical Frontiers /
www.worldpharmaceuticals.net
“Excipients are present in all formulations”, Bashir explains, “even simple non-medicinal classed probiotics and vitamin supplements”. Put simply, excipients are anything other than the active ingredient (the word derives from the Latin excipere, meaning ‘to except’) – a negative definition that leaves a lot of scope for just what an excipient is. In practice, excipients can be anything from sugars to salts to starches to silicones. Common examples of pharmaceutical excipients include sesame oil, lactose, sucrose, and lanolin. As Bashir notes, “even water would be an excipient”..
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