Solid Form Diversity of Amorphous Drugs

In the context of pharmaceutical development poor aqueous solubility remains a challenge for most low molecular weight drugs. Despite the availability of a range of solubility enhancing strategies, especially for the so-called “brick dust molecules” enabling formulations are increasingly required.

In this context also amorphous forms of drugs are used. Whilst it can be stated that today amorphous solid dispersions are an advanced routine formulation approach, a better understanding of the amorphous forms of the drug molecules themselves remains an issue of important research, both as a rational basis for the development of ASDs as well as for the exciting opportunity to enable the development of amorphous engineering approaches.

In this presentation we will discuss several case studies of our own work on amorphous form diversity, ranging from preparation dependency of amorphous characteristics to the preparation and investigation of polyamorphous forms of drugs.

Short Bio

Since March 2012 Professor Thomas Rades (TR) is the Research Chair in Pharmaceutical Design and Drug Delivery at the Department of Pharmacy, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Before that he has been the Chair in Pharmaceutical Sciences at the National School of Pharmacy, University of Otago, New Zealand (2003 – 2012).

Professor Rades has developed an international reputation for his research in the physical characterization and formulation of drugs and solid dosage forms as well as lipid-based drug deliverysystems. He has published more than 540 papers in international peer reviewed journals and has successfully supervised more than 85 PhD students.

He is the Editor-in-Chief of the European Journal of Pharmaceutics and Biopharmaceutics, and holds honorary doctorates of Åbo Akademi University, Finland and Helsinki University, Finland, and an honorary professorship at the University of Otago, New Zealand.

The presentation is organised by the Department of Pharmacy and CANS - Centre for New Antibacterial Strategies.