Link between expiry dates and structural properties of antibiotics gives tips to enhance bioavailability

Project Engineer Semyon Lapuk, one of the winners of Russian Presidential scholarships, works on glass-like antibiotics.

Over 40% of current antibiotics are not water-soluble, and increasing this ratio is one of the key objectives for contemporary pharmaceutical chemistry.

“To raise solubility, usually polymers or other compounds can be added to a medication, or it gets granulated,” explains Lapuk. “One of the solutions is to make medications amorphous, i. e., to produce a state where they don’t have an ordered crystal lattice. Amorphous drugs have higher bioavailability because their solubility and solution speed can be up to a thousand times higher than for crystallized forms. It means that you can significantly decrease dosages and thus also the number and severity of side effects.”

The main disadvantage of amorphous forms is their fast expiry stemming from low resistance to crystallization. Lapuk plans to obtain and study amorphous forms of quinolones, “This will be achieved with classic and ultra-fast scanning calorimetry. We will also propose an optimal model to describe the kinetics of cold crystallization process of quinolones and calculate the fragility parameters for the glasses of this class.”

 

Source text: Larisa Busil

Photo: Semyon Lapuk

Translation: Yury Nurmeev