Drug development oral bioavailability

Drug A is a large, peptide-like molecule (MW 700 g/mol) and is highly lipophilic and poorly water soluble. It is a BCS Class II drugs. Its oral bioavailability in capsules and conventional tablet formulations is low, yielding practically undetected blood levels. A novel lipid formulation containing a solvent, a high HLB nonionic surfactant, and a fatty acid were developed with sufLcient oral bioavailability for use in the clinic. 

Traditionally, in pursuit of their structure-activity relationships, medicinal chemists had focused almost exclusively on finding compounds with greater and greater potency. However, these SARs often ended up with compounds that were unsuitable for development as pharmaceutical products. These compounds would be too insoluble in water, or were not orally bioavailable, or were eliminated too quickly or too slowly from mammalian bodies. Pharmacologists and pharmaceutical development scientists for years had tried to preach the need for medicinal chemists to also think about other factors that determined whether a compound could be a medicine. Table 1.1 lists a number of factors that determine whether a potent compound has what it takes to become a drug. Experimentally, it was difficult to quantitate these other factors. Often, the necessary manpower resources would not be allocated to a compound until it had already been selected for project team status. 

A model for predicting oral bioavailability is an important tool, both in the early phases of drug discovery to select the most promising leads for further optimization, and in the later stages to select candidates for clinical development. The... 

This volume gives an overview of the current status and an outlook to future more reliable predictive approaches. It is subdivided in five sections dealing with studies of membrane permeability and oral absorption, drug dissolution and solubility, the role of transporters and metabolism in oral absorption, computational approaches to drug absorption and bioavailability, and finally with certain drug development issues. 

The volume is divided into five sections. Part one looks at the experimental study of membrane permeability and oral absorption. In Part two, problems of measuring and prediction solubility, as one of the key determinants in the absorption process, will be discussed in detail. In the next part, progress in the science around transporter proteins and gut wall metabolism and their effect on the overall absorption process is presented. Part four looks at the in silico approaches and models to predict permeability, absorption and bioavailability. In the last part of the book, a number of drug development issues will be highlighted, which could have an important impact of the overall delivery strategies for oral pharmaceutical products. 

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