Softabs-designing sugar-free viscoelastic drug delivery capsules for hydrophobic cannabinoid, nutraceutical, and pharmacological delivery across mucosal membranes

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Cannabinoids, especially cannabidiol show promise as medicinal agents and are often now proscribed for a variety of indications. One of the major challenges is the lack of a standard dose, and safe ways to ingest. Smoking dried plant material causes harmful particles to enter the lungs, while homemade "edibles" can both vary in their potency and as they must pass through the liver due to digestion, can lead to different levels of cannabidiol entering the blood of different people. Oil tinctures are adsorbed across the mucosal membranes in the mouth, but are foul. In this three-year partnership, supported by NSERC and Mitacs, SofTab Technologies is partnering with University of Windsor Chemistry and Biochemistry professors Dr. John Trant and Dr. Simon Rondeau-Gagné to prepare a soft chewable formulation. These proposed SofTabs, although superficially similar to "gummies" are very different in practice. They are soft capsules of an emulsion of oils that dissolves in the mouth upon chewing and crosses the mucosal membranes moving directly into the blood stream. They are far more palatable than oils, and provide this defined dose in a simple form. The partners will work on designing new specific formulations for the vegan and halal markets as well as refining the formulation for different dosage forms and different levels of cannabis in the dose. This is challenging as any change to the formulation changes both the properties of the nanoemulsion AND the properties of the SofTab as a whole. To accelerate the work in the future, we hope to develop a better understanding and ability to predict precisely how changes in the ingredients affect these properties. This is generally useful to the scientific community as it provides insight into the self-assembly of complex amphiphilic systems. We will also look at how well the nanoemulsions cross the mucosal membrane using a mouse model to confirm how much of the dose is available to patients. The end-goal of this project is to produce a reliable, safe, and pleasant method for introducing medical cannabinoids, and it will be used to then expand this technology to other classes of vitamins and supplements that would benefit from the same approach.