2001 Volume 1 Issue 7 Pages 725-733,722
“Oleoscience” is very useful and important in formulation research and development, and the associated technologies are now often employed during the pharmaceutical formulation development stage. In this review, some “Oleoscience” based methods used in recent pharmaceutical formulation development studies are illustrated and evaluated. The following experiments are described : measuring the degree of self-assembly between the molecules of a drug by using the physicochemical method; analyzing the relationship between orally administered dose in human and capacity factor determined from liposome chromatography; estimating the physicochemical stability of liposomes by osmometry; determination of the thickness of the hydration layer around liposomes by measuring zeta-potentials; estimating the degree of aggregation in water/oil emulsions using dielectric relaxation measurement; particle size determination of perfluorocarbon/water emulsions by phase doppler particle analysis; analysis of an immuno-reaction between drug-antibody complex and antigen expressed by tumor cells using surface plasmon resonance method; molecular weight determination of macromolecular drugs by using light-scattering, and so on. The number of poorly or less water-soluble and macromolecular drugs is increasing, providing fresh challenges for pharmaceutical formulation research. New drug delivery technology is expected to provide novel solutions to some of the problems often encountered when developing suitable formulations for these new types of products. The methods described in this review demonstrate some of the basic and important technologies for drug delivery, which are required to support this rapidly growing area of pharmaceutical research.
