Leveraging the use of in vitro and computational methods to support the development of enabling oral drug products: An InPharma commentary.

Due to the strong tendency towards poorly soluble drugs in modern development pipelines, enabling drug formulations such as amorphous solid dispersions, cyclodextrins, co-crystals and lipid-based formulations are frequently applied to solubilize or generate supersaturation in gastrointestinal fluids, thus enhancing oral drug absorption. Although many innovative in vitro and in silico tools have been introduced in recent years to aid development of enabling formulations, significant knowledge gaps still exist with respect to how best to implement them. As a result, the development strategy for enabling formulations varies considerably within the industry and many elements of empiricism remain. The InPharma network aims to advance a mechanistic, animal-free approach to the assessment of drug developability. This commentary focuses current status and next steps that will be taken in InPharma to identify and fully utilize 'best practice' in vitro and in silico tools for use in physiologically based biopharmaceutic models.

Polymer-embedded deep eutectic solvents (PEDES) as a novel bio-enabling formulation approach.

There is a growing interest in using deep eutectic solvents (DES) as a pharmaceutical delivery system for poorly water-soluble compounds. To reduce the risk of drug precipitation following oral administration, this study addresses the hypothesis that directly including a polymeric precipitation inhibitor (PI) in a DES mixture could obtain a polymer-embedded deep eutectic system (PEDES) as a novel bio-enabling formulation principle. Following broad formulation screening, a PEDES embedding 15% w/w of polyvinyl pyrrolidone K30 (PVP) in L-carnitine:ethylene glycol (1:4, molar ratio) DES was successfully formulated as a supersaturating formulation using indomethacin as model compound. The drug solubility of 175.6 mg/mL obtained in DES was remarkably high, and upon release (phosphate buffer, pH 6.5) a maximum supersaturation factor of 9.8 was recorded, whereby the release kinetics displayed a suitable "parachute effect". The formulation was further characterized to include a molecular dynamics simulation. It can be concluded that PEDES appears to be a viable novel formulation approach, setting solid grounds for further research to assess the full potential of this novel type of supersaturating drug delivery system.