Talk 4: Aspects of Sustainability in Amorphous Drug and Dosage Form Design

Thomas Rades

Department of Pharmacy, University of Copenhagen, Denmark, thomas.rades@sund.ku.dk

ABSTRACT

Sustainability becomes increasingly important in all aspects of life and drug discovery, drug delivery and dosage form design should not make an exception here. One of the main pathways for more sustainable drugs is to increase their bioavailability, since lower drug doses could be used and less drug will be excreted to the environment after oral administration. Moreover the production of raw materials (drugs and excipients) as well as the technologies used to prepare dosage forms should include sustainability as a guiding principle. In this presentation, examples of such a thinking are given on our own collaborative work on amorphous drugs and dosage forms. Specifically, the preparation and use of sustainable polymers to prepare amorphous solid dispersions and the use of mechanochemical methods to amorphisation will be presented.

SHORT BIO

Since March 2012 Professor Thomas Rades is the Research Chair in Pharmaceutical Design and Drug Delivery in the Department of Pharmacy, University of Copenhagen. Before that he has been the Chair in Pharmaceutical Sciences at the National School of Pharmacy, University of Otago, New Zealand from 2003 – 2012. In 1994 he received a PhD from the University of Braunschweig, Germany for his work on thermotropic and lyotropic liquid crystalline drugs. After working as a Research Scientist in the Preclinical Development and Formulation at F. Hoffmann-La Roche in Basel, Switzerland, he became a Senior Lecturer in Pharmaceutical Sciences at Otago in 1999 and since 2003 held the Chair in Pharmaceutical Sciences in Otago. Professor Rades has developed an international reputation for his research in the physical characterization of drugs and solid dosage forms as well as in drug and vaccine delivery. He has published more than 500 papers in international peer reviewed journals as well as 17 book chapters, 13 patents and 3 books and successfully supervised more than 80 PhD students. Since January 2022 he is the Editor-in-Chief of the European Journal of Pharmaceutics and Biopharmaceutics. He holds honorary doctorates of Åbo Akademi University, Finland, and Helsinki University, Finland, and an honorary professorship at the University of Otago, New Zealand. He is an Eminent Fellow of the Academy of Pharmaceutical Sciences (UK), a Fellow of the New Zealand Institute of Chemistry and a member of the College of Fellows of the Controlled Release Society. For his undergraduate and postgraduate teaching he was awarded the New Zealand Tertiary Teaching Excellence Award for Sustained Excellence (2005).