Therapeutics Applications of Nanosuspension in Topical/ Mucosal Drug Delivery

During the last two decades, many modern technologies have been established in the pharmaceutical research and development area. The automation of the drug discovery process by technologies such as high-throughput screening, combinatorial chemistry, and computer-aided drug design is leading to a vast number of drug candidates possessing a very good efficacy [1]. Unfortunately, many of these drug candidates are exhibiting poor aqueous solubility. According to estimates, about 40% of the drugs in the pipelines have solubility problems [2]. The increased use of high throughput screening methods leads to the discovery of more drugs being poorly water soluble. In the literature, figures are quoted that about 60 percent of the drugs coming directly from synthesis are nowadays poorly soluble [2]. Poor solubility is not only a problem for the formulation development and clinical testing; it is also an obstacle at the very beginning when screening new compounds for pharmacological activity. Long before one of these compounds can reach the market; it needs to be formulated for the pharmacological activity tests and for the preclinical studies. From this, there is a definite need for smart technological formulation approaches to make such poorly soluble drugs bioavailable. The great challenge for the pharmaceutical development is to create new formulation approaches and drug-delivery systems to overcome solubility problems of these drug candidates which are also often associated with poor oral bioavailability [1,3,4]. Making such drugs bioavailable means that they show sufficiently high absorption after oral administration, or they can alternatively be injected intravenously.