Will uni expert find a tonic for drug industry?
PROF TO LEAD RESEARCH ON SPEEDING UP DEVELOPMENT OF MEDICINES
A £1.1 MILLION project could make it easier and cheaper for pharmaceutical companies to develop new medicines.
De Montfort University professors Mingzhong Li and Walkiria Schlindwein have been awarded more than £674,890 by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council for the project, working alongside a team at the University of Surrey, which has received £409,247.
Using its combined expertise in chemistry, manufacturing and computer modelling, the team aims to create models that can predict how medicines are released from immediate release (IR) tablets, which are designed to release the active ingredients rapidly once swallowed.
These tablets are commonly used for medications that need to act quickly, such as headache tablets or antacids.
Currently, the process of developing the tablets involves creating many physical prototypes and multiple tests.
By using computer simulations and experiments to develop the models, the researchers hope to streamline this process.
This would allow pharmaceutical companies to design and test IR tablets virtually, speeding up the development of new drugs and putting them on the market more quickly and cheaply.
Professor Li, who is leading the project, is professor of crystal engineering and drug delivery at DMU’s Leicester School of Pharmacy.
His research is focused on helping drug companies to improve production quality and reduce manufacturing costs through the use of modelling techniques.
Professor Schlindwein is professor of pharmaceutics in the Leicester School of Pharmacy and has collaborated with Prof Li on the drug formulations and dissolution studies.
Professor Li said: “Tablets account for the vast majority of medicines that our health systems rely on and provide the quality of life we have come to expect of the past century.
“Despite being deceptively well understood, tablet design and manufacturing are challenging.
“In this project, we are aiming to develop the fundamental understandings of how a tablet releases the active pharmaceutical ingredients in the gastrointestinal tract, leading to a step change in our ability to model, analyse, and design the pharmaceutical products.”
Work on the three-year project will begin in July.