Society's Chief Scientist Presents At Neutron Scattering Conference, UK

Main Category: Pharmacy / Pharmacist
Also Included In: Conferences
Article Date: 26 Jan 2010 - 2:00 PDT

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The Royal Pharmaceutical Society's (RPSGB) Chief Scientific Advisor Jayne Lawrence presented work aimed at improving medicines at a neutron scattering conference in Grenoble, France last week.

Research was carried out alongside her King's College London colleagues to look at how drugs could be made soluble as they are inefficient otherwise.

Giving a drug to a patient by mouth is the most cost effective, most patient-friendly way to take them but it is estimated that 40% of all potential drugs fail because of water-solubility. This causes a huge problem as some potentially important drugs don't reach the market.

The aim of the study by the RPSGB and King's College is to understand why certain drugs aren't soluble and to find ways of making them soluble so they can be absorbed by the body.

Jayne and her colleagues are interested in preparing a water-based formulation of steroids for oral administration. In order to achieve this they are using the rather unusual technique of neutron scattering - neutrons are small, neutral sub-atomic particles.

RPSGB Chief Scientific Advisor Jayne Lawrence said; "Potentially crucial drugs are not becoming available to patients because they are not soluble and we have aimed to address this growing problem in our research.

"Neutron scattering is an exciting method and is the same technology used in the Hadron Collider. We are really pleased to have used this to come up with a design that increases drug solubility.

"Steroids were chosen as they are particularly insoluble and are usually injected into the muscle, but the same technique can be used for a range of other drugs including anti cancer agents."

Neutron scattering is not a technique that you find in a University or an industrial research laboratory. There is only one instrument used to perform these experiments in the UK - the ISIS Facility at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratories in Didcot. It acts like a microscope and allows Jayne and her colleagues to look inside a molecule to see very small structures a couple of nm in size. For comparison, a typical bacteria is about 1,000 times larger in size.

Source
Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain

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