Development of novel and industrially-relevant liquid pharmaceutical formulations to enable paediatric combination drug therapy

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Co-encapsulation and co-delivery of two or more functional molecules from a single formulation is an emerging academic and industrial research field for a wide range of applications. More specifically, in the pharmaceutical industry there has been extensive research in this area, in order to develop fixed-dose combination (FDC) drugs to treat conditions where multiple active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) are required. Liquid formulations offer dosage flexibility, while addressing dosage form needs of specific patient populations (e.g. paediatrics). In addition, emulsions are attractive microstructures for the encapsulation/controlled delivery of functional molecules due to their multiphase attributes, ease of formation, as well as their utilisation in a number of structured liquid/semi-liquid products currently on the market. In this project, processing and formulation routes for the fabrication of novel sub-micrometre particles from pharmaceutically-relevant materials will be explored. The fabricated particles will be used to encapsulate an API of paediatric relevance, and different strategies will be developed to trigger and optimise the API release, while devising approaches to promote their Pickering functionality. Simple o/w emulsions will be employed to optimise the encapsulation and release of a secondary active ingredient. Once a better understanding of the mechanisms underpinning the encapsulation and release of a sole API from either particles or liquid droplets is achieved, the two will be combined to investigate the co-encapsulation and co-delivery of two APIs.