Photo by Bill Branson
A new drug-making technique could reduce the risk of hemolysis, thrombosis, and other serious side effects that can occur with injectable drugs, according to researchers.
The team used the technique to remove potentially harmful additives—surfactants—from 12 common injectable drugs.
Jonathan F. Lovell, PhD, of University at Buffalo in New York, and his colleagues described the technique in Nature Communications.
Pharmaceutical companies use surfactants to dissolve a medicine into a liquid solution, making it suitable for injection. Unfortunately, solutions loaded with surfactants and other nonessential ingredients may increase the risk of thrombosis, hemolysis, anaphylactic shock, and other side effects.
Researchers have tried to address this problem in two ways, each with varying degrees of success.
Some have taken the “top-down” approach, in which they shrink drug particles to nanoscale sizes to eliminate excess additives. While promising, the method doesn’t work well with injectable medicine because the drug particles are still too large to safely inject.
Other researchers have worked from the “bottom up,” using nanotechnology to build new drugs from scratch. This can yield the desired results, but developing new drug formulations takes years, and drugs are coupled with new additives that can produce new side effects.
The technique described in Nature Communications differs from both of these approaches.
Dr Lovell and his colleagues dissolved 12 drugs—vitamin K1, cyclosporine, cabazitaxel, and others—one at a time into a surfactant called Pluronic. Then, by lowering the solution’s temperature to 4° C, they were able to remove the excess Pluronic via a membrane.
The end result was drugs that contain 100 to 1000 times less excess additives.
“For the drugs we looked at, this is as close as anyone has gotten to introducing pure, injectable medicine into the body,” Dr Lovell said. “Essentially, it’s a new way to package drugs.”
The findings are significant, he said, because they show that many injectable drug formulations may be improved through an easy-to-adopt process. He and his colleagues are now working to refine the method further.
