Chapter 13. Advanced Drug Delivery

Summary

Advances in protein and peptide research have provided key information on distinctive disposition characteristics, molecular understanding of sequence determinants, details of the intricate barriers to protein absorption, and the mechanisms of distribution and elimination. The rapidly growing knowledge has allowed development of novel drug delivery strategies. By one estimate the annual sale of drug delivery products is over $40 billion and will reach $70 billion by 2006. Advanced drug delivery research has yielded products with improved therapeutic index and other improvements in safety and efficacy, such as reducing the frequency needed to provide similar or even better therapeutic responses. Drug delivery strategies have also benefited from the miniaturization of microprocessor-controlled programmable devices to fine-tune the therapeutic levels of biopharmaceuticals for chronic therapies, especially for drugs with short half-lives. Research to discover sites of drug action through proteomic modeling and high throughput screening has yielded targets that have been used to construct fusion proteins with added effector function to enhance pharmacologic activity. As the efficiency of identifying drug targets has improved and cloning technology has matured, pharmaceutical formulation and delivery have become the rate-limiting step in bringing new molecular entities to the market.