Changing The Way Medications Are Delivered

Each year, a large number of new drugs are discovered and submitted to regulatory agencies for approval. While each of these substances has benefits for treating certain conditions and certain parts of the body, almost all have unwanted side effects or become less effective when taken orally. Today, advances in technology have changed the way medications are delivered to maximize effect while minimizing side effects.

Drugs that break down and lose effectiveness in stomach acid have traditionally been delivered either by injection or in an enteric coated form that did not expose the medication to the acid in the stomach. Instead, the coating would break down in acid while protecting the drug until it was past the stomach and in the small intestine. However, this is not always the best mode of delivery.

Drugs that are designed to benefit specific organs and fight specific conditions can be toxic to healthy tissues in other parts of the body. This makes systemic dosing difficult to manage because one must balance the benefit with the risk to other systems. This has kept many medications that could have been of immense benefit in the trial stages for several years.

Doctors that have worked on gene therapy have found a method of targeting medications and delivering them so that they only affect the specific cell types they are intended to help. This has opened up entire new avenues in the treatment of different types of cancer and other serious or deadly conditions. These doctors have found a way to synthesize liposomes, which are bubbles composed of phosphorous lipid bilayers virtually identical to cell membranes.

These bubbles can be created in different sizes and using different materials so that they react only with certain cells. This makes it possible to package potentially toxic drugs in such a manner that they never enter the main systems of the body. Instead, they are delivered directly to the area to be treated.

Liposome research is also being done on nutrients that lose their efficacy or become difficult for the body to absorb when taken as supplements. This is geared to making it possible to obtain maximum benefit from dietary supplementation without having to over compensate the dosage in order to actually obtain an amount the body can use. It should improve the ability of manufacturers to produce efficient dosing in a variety of vitamins and minerals that have been difficult or impossible to supplement until now.