Duncan Stacey, sales & marketing director at Linkam Scientific, and Sheng Qi, reader in pharmaceutics at the School of Pharmacy, University of East Anglia discuss how to improve drug-polymer miscibility analysis using a new microscopy-based method.
Analysis
A new microscopy-based method – thermal analysis by structure characterisation (TASC) – saves time, improves sensitivity and significantly reduces the amount of material required for drug-polymer miscibility analysis. TASC looks set to become a standard screening test in early drug development.
The problem of solubility
New chemical entities emerging from high-throughput screening programmes often exhibit unfavourable solubility properties, with some estimates suggesting that ‘approximately 60–70% of drug molecules are insufficiently soluble in aqueous media’1.