PFI-RP: Innovation of Materials Based on Sustainable Resources to Enhance Performance of Challenging Drugs and Drug Candidates.

该PFI项目更广泛的影响/商业潜力是提高患者目前在药剂师身上发现的药物的性能？并增加有效新药的数量，使患者能够治疗严重的医疗问题。目前，高达90%的候选药物不需要？T完全溶于水，导致原本有效的候选人失败；所有人大约70%都是水。我们将设计新的材料，由可再生资源制成，因此是良性的和环保的，解决给药给病人的关键问题。这些目前尚未解决的问题包括无法从需要高剂量的药物中制造出对患者友好的配方（药片）（产生难以吞咽的“马丸”）。另一个尚未解决的重要问题是许多候选药物的失败，这些候选药物往往会从水溶液中迅速形成晶体。当这些药物失败时，药物开发的成本就会上升，最终会转嫁到患者身上。原本可以有效治疗疾病的药物，以及病人迫切需要的药物，永远无法到达他们手中。我们的工作将以更快的速度和更便宜的价格为患者带来更多的药物，并将减少目前药房货架上药物的成本、副作用、剂量和患者之间的性能差异。拟议项目的目标是设计、制备和评估两种由天然纤维素制备的新材料，这种材料储量丰富、可再生、无害，并且已经从树木中大量收获。这些材料将经过精心设计，使目前的纤维素衍生物制造商很容易制造出来，并在提高药物性能方面发挥特别好的作用。它们将被设计用来帮助创造现有药物或正在开发的候选药物的解决方案，这些解决方案比使用现有技术所能提供的每体积溶解药物多得多。在人体内制造这些更浓缩的药物或候选药物溶液的能力将允许患者以更低的药物剂量将足够的药物/候选药物进入他们的血液中以达到预期的治疗效果。我们将设计、制造和表征这些材料，证明它们可以创造出更浓缩的关键药物溶液，并找出哪些特征可以提高它们的性能，这样我们就可以设计出更好的材料。与我们的工业合作伙伴一起，我们将推进最佳候选材料的商业化，使它们能够造福患者。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The broader impact/commercial potential of this PFI project is to enhance performance of the drugs that patients currently find on the pharmacist?s shelf, and to increase the number of effective new drugs that reach patients to treat critical medical issues. Currently up to 90% of drug candidates don?t fully dissolve in water, contributing to failure of otherwise effective candidates; all humans are roughly 70% water. We will design new materials, made from renewable resources and thus benign and environmentally sound, that solve key problems in drug delivery to patients. These currently unsolved problems include the inability to create patient-friendly formulations (pills) from drugs that require high doses (creating hard to swallow "horse pills"). Another important unsolved problem is failures of many drug candidates that tend to quickly form crystals from a water solution. When these drugs fail, cost of drug development goes up, which is ultimately passed along to patients. Drugs that would otherwise effectively treat diseases and are sorely needed by patients, never reach them. Our work will bring more drugs to patients, faster and more cheaply, and will reduce cost, side effects, dose, and variation in performance from patient to patient for drugs currently on the pharmacy shelf.The proposed project targets the design, preparation, and evaluation of two new families of materials prepared from natural cellulose, which is incredibly abundant, renewable, benign, and harvested in large quantities already from trees. These materials will be carefully designed so as to be easily made by current manufacturers of cellulose derivatives, and to work exceptionally well at enhancing the performance of drugs. They will be designed to help create solutions of current drugs, or drug candidates that are under development, that have far more dissolved drug per volume than is possible using current technologies. The ability to create these more concentrated solutions of drug or drug candidates in the human body will permit patients to get enough drug/drug candidate into their bloodstream to have the desired therapeutic effect, but at much lower drug dose. We will design, make, and characterize these materials, show that they work to create more concentrated solutions of key drugs, and figure out what features enhance their performance, so we can design even better materials. With our industrial partners, we will advance the best candidate materials towards commercialization so that they can benefit patients.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.