OUR TECHNOLOGY FOCUS AREAS

The majority of NCEs in clinical development, and pharmaceutical products on the market, contain poorly soluble drugs.  Thus there is significant demand for new and improved formulation approaches to develop these drugs.  Nano-technology is driving the solution for many of these difficult formulation challenges, providing new options for pharmaceutical products to be developed with improved biopharmaceutical properties.  Using these technologies, products with lower doses, reduced food effects, less painful injections, more rapid onset-of-action, improved palatability and many other outcomes are made possible.

Formulating poorly water soluble drugs has traditionally been approached by creating new salt forms or co-crystals, micronizing the drug substance, or creating lipidic emulsions.  As drugs become even more insoluble, more sophisticated approaches are required.  Ascendia provides the parallel investigation of multiple technical solutions to see which one works best for a particular molecule.  All of these approaches have one common goal – to improve the bioavailability of the drug by increasing the rate and extent of its dissolution in biological fluid.

Ascendia specializes in the application of nano-technology approaches to overcome solubility hurdles and develop novel pharmaceutical products.  Nano-technology in the pharmaceutical field encompasses many types of formulation approaches, from nano-particles, to self-emulsifying lipid systems, to dispersed amorphous systems, to nano-emulsions.  Ascendia’s suite of state-of-the-art technologies for formulating poorly water soluble compounds provide sophisticated formulation options for our clients, and the unique dosage forms we create can be administered orally, topically, or by injection.

Developing long-acting oral medications for poorly soluble drugs is particularly challenging.  The formulation design has to take into account the transit time in the gastrointestinal tract, the pH of the stomach and intestine both with and without food, salinity and interaction with bile salts, and many other considerations.  Ascendia has expertise developing coated particles and molecularly dispersed systems that can overcome these challenges.  Our dosage forms solubilize the drug in small particles that when disseminated in the GI tract allow the drug to dissolve more readily.  The particles contain coatings that are time and pH sensitive so that a controlled release effect is achieved as the particles transit the GI tract.