Location, location, location: Gastrointestinal delivery site and its impact on absorption

摘要

The majority of projects within the pharmaceutical industry's R&D pipeline remain focused on delivering products for oral administration. As the competitive tensions within the marketplace have escalated, it has become almost a prerequisite that any new oral medicine must be amenable to a once-a-day dosing regimen. Coincidently, the spectrum of molecular targets being addressed by the industry has grown in complexity, and an increasing proportion of the drug candidates emerging from medicinal chemistry programs are associated with suboptimal biopharmaceutical properties for oral delivery. Ultimately, the responsibility for converting these suboptimal drug molecules into optimized drug products resides with pharmaceutical scientists. Any attempt to optimize an oral drug product, however, must be underpinned by a solid understanding of how the molecule is handled within the gastrointestinal (GI) tract.