A Discussion on Industry Trends and Their Influence on Oral Solid Dose Formulations (CPHI Milan 2024)

Editor's note: this interview was originally published on PharmTech.com.

At CPHI Milan, the Pharmaceutical Technology Group sat with Camille Dumont, PhD, manager, customer applications for Innovaform Accelerator at the Capsules & Health Ingredients business of Lonza, to discuss major bio/pharmaceutical industry trends and their influence on oral solid dose formulations.

Camille Dumont, Manager, Customer Applications, Lonza. Image courtesy of Lonza.

“One of the trends we see with our customers, with the rise of inflamed bowel disease occurrence, is the oral delivery of live biotherapeutic products, which are originally administered for very invasive techniques,” she said. “[N]ow, we see lots of people working to have [these products] administered as a solid oral dosage form. Another important trend is the oral delivery of biologics such as peptides, proteins, mAbs [monoclonal antibodies], or mRNA [messenger RNA]. Most of these drug modalities are currently injected.”

Dumont pointed out that the injection route of administration can reduce patient adherence and can have a significant cost on healthcare systems. She emphasized that these types of APIs are fragile, however, and so require innovative solutions to achieve significant oral bioavailability. “Most of the time, only a combination of various strategies will result in [achieving] significant bioavailability and efficacy of these drug modalities, such as [using] enabling formulation devices and so on.

We offer formulation and targeted release capsule innovation to support this kind of need,” she stated.

To increase the bioavailability of many of these new drugs and new chemical entities, Dumont observed that there is a need for enabling formulation strategies, including permeation enhancers. “Recently, we have seen that a lot of biotechs [are] work[ing] on smart devices that are able to deliver fragile drug modalities directly by injection into the wall of the gastrointestinal tract. We can see that most of these innovations … rely on target release of the formulation … Solutions for target deliveries such as functional capsules appear as really interesting solutions for the pharmaceutical industry,” Dumont said.

With Lonza for about three years, Dumont is a chemical engineer with a PhD in pharmaceutical sciences from the University of Lyon, France. She has 10 years of experience in the pharma industry in developing innovative solutions for bioavailability enhancement, with particular expertise in lipid-based formulation and oral bioavailability enhancement of small and large molecules.

Click above for the full interview.

Attendees can visit Lonza at Booth 6A2. CPHI Milan is being held from Oct. 8–10, 2024 in Milan, Italy.