Bioavailability & Bioequivalence

Biography

Biography: Sudhir Kumar Sharma

Abstract

In pharmaceutical industry, poor water solubility and limited bioavailability has a major concern on new drug development. It is well established that the bioavailability of such drugs can be improved by reducing their particle size. A number of conventional strategies are available in literature for particle size reduction but they suffer with some disadvantages and handling concerns. Recently, supercritical CO₂ (sc-CO₂) based processes are found to be more promising for micronization of pharmaceuticals as they have successfully addressed the above concerns and offer additional advantages like economic, non-toxic, scalable, environmentally compatible and etc. In present studies, we report the synthesis of naproxen molecular clusters via supercritical CO₂ drug formulation. These molecular clusters were collected in a special designed a two-stage collection vessel, cooled to liquid N₂ temperatures, resulted embedding of drug molecular clusters in ‘dry ice’. Gradual transferring of the ‘dry ice’ into deionized water, resulted in the true solubilization of drug molecular clusters.  Afterword’s, these solutions were drop-casted on silicon substrate and dried for overnight under ambient conditions, resulted in a stable, viscous films with liquid like behavior. Analytical characterizations showed that these solutions have retained their chemical and structural identity after sc-CO₂ processing. This is interesting to note that raw naproxen powder is solid powder under ambient conditions with melting points of 154^o C. Our observations are expected to explore the sc-CO₂ processing strategy for other existing drug formulations and would open up new drug delivery platforms.