Nanostructured carrier systems with controlled drug release for personalized tablets

• Applicant: Professor Dr.-Ing. Carsten Schilde
• Subject Area: Mechanical Process Engineering
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 539324729

Current trends in the field of individualised medicine and increasing the bioavailability of newly developed, poorly soluble drugs pose considerable challenges for drug development and the application of existing galenic methods. For example, most drug carrier systems manufactured for poorly soluble drugs have so far hardly allowed flexible adaptation of the defined release kinetics or versatile embedding of different active ingredients and dosages without having to carefully reformulate the formulation and redesign the manufacturing process. The use of structurally defined, chemically inert silica aggregates as active ingredient carriers has a wide range of applications, as the downstream embedding of the active ingredient appears to be virtually independent of the chemical structure of the active ingredient. Another advantage is the temporal and spatial decoupling of the active ingredient embedding process from the active ingredient synthesis and further processing into tablets, whereby different active ingredients can be embedded in active ingredient carrier systems with different release properties and combined in the tablet, as in a modular system, regardless of the formulation. In the future, this may represent a pioneering basis for patient group-specific formulations. The aim of the project is therefore to produce tablets with customised drug release kinetics based on hierarchical silica aggregates with mesoporous properties by scaling up known manufacturing processes to pilot scale. Additional mass transport modelling will enable the targeted adaptation of drug release to specific release profiles of tablets, which can then be transferred to different particulate systems and active ingredients. In order to realise the goals and challenges in the scale-up of a suitable process chain for the production of patient group-specific, adaptable drug carrier systems, an interdisciplinary collaboration between the TU Braunschweig, the Fraunhofer IST and the companies Pharma Test Apparatebau AG and Tantec A/S is planned.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants (Transfer Project)
• Application Partner: Pharma Test Apparatebau AG; Tantec A/S
• Cooperation Partners: Dr. Kristina Lachmann; Dr.-Ing. Sebastian Melzig