St Remy meeting focuses on lipid-based drug delivery

The 40th St Remy conference took on an extensive review of key scientific and applied aspects of lipid driven bioavailability enhancement and investigative tools for predicting in-vivo results.

The past decade has been witness to a great number of developments and a growing interest in this field. Significant progress has been made in manufacturing possibilities with hard and soft shell capsules and lipid based formulation technologies. In the meantime, there has been an emergence of excipients with acceptable regulatory and safety profiles.

Nevertheless, in spite of these advancements, the pharmaceutical industry has yet to fully embrace lipid-based drug delivery as a viable alternative to traditional formulation approaches. Many issues including lack of investigative tools for predicting drug disposition in-vivo, lapses in scientific explanations for the precise and complete role of various lipid based excipients influencing absorption remain to be addressed.

The presentation topics covered the latest findings on the potential role of transporter and efflux mechanisms, influence of lipid based excipients on absorption, pre-formulation decision trees, manufacturing advances in hard and soft shell capsules, and lipid based formulation technologies.

The meeting attracted contributions from academic and industrial research organisations, covering the scientific and the application aspects of lipid driven bioavailability enhancement.

Oral route absorption, involving a wide array of inter-related mechanisms, in both physico-chemical phenomena and physiological processes, was the topic of the first of the three sessions of this conference establishing a link between the ubiquitous Biopharmaceutics Classification System and the disposition of various drugs in vivo as influenced by an interplay of transporters and enzymes to provide a predictive tool in predicting bioavailability.

More focused approaches were presented on the interaction of lipophilic drugs with cell membranes using liposomes as models, as well as the action certain lipids may have on various transporters or metabolic pathways.

The second session was devoted to the challenge of formulating poorly soluble drugs into industrially and commercially acceptable dosage forms.

The topics included formulation decision trees for newly developed chemical entities, optimizing lipid based formulations and predicting their in vivo behavior, new opportunities offered by the recent development of liquid filled capsules and feasibility of incorporating a lipidic formulation into solid dosage forms.

In the last part of the Journees Galeniques de St Remy, more practical experiences were presented, one describing the role of one major lipidic excipient in improving drug absorption at the intestinal level.

Not surprisingly, the conference ended by returning to the Biopharmaceutical Classification System and drug disposition, this time as a tool to develop early formulations of poorly bioavailable compounds for first in human trials.

Journees Galeniques de St Remy was founded in 1967 by Henri-Marcel Gattefosse whose vision was to create a platform for scientific exchange in an atmosphere of trust and respect allowing researchers to gather each year in the south of France, to share their findings, discuss perspectives and to lay down a path for further research on the topic at hand.