Dry powder report

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Dry powder formulation for pulmonary delivery

Introduction: For many years, pressurized metered dose inhalers (pMDIs) have been the leading application form of inhalation therapy. With their favorable features, such as easy handling, high reliability and accurate metering performance, pMDIs currently account for more than 90% of all inhaled asthma therapy. However, traditional pMDIs also have a number of important drawbacks; for example, they require difficult hand–lung coordination by the patient and use environmentally damaging CFC propellants. Although newer pMDIs and formulations, which go some way to addressing these problems, are gradually becoming available, this type of drug delivery is intrinsically inefficient and, in normal circumstances, only 10–15% of the dose reaches the lung. Moreover, formulating drugs for use in pMDIs is difficult, especially with the newer propellants. By contrast, nebulizers are very efficient at creating mists of extremely fine droplets with good pulmonary deposition. However, it can take several minutes for a patient to inhale a dose from a nebulizer and these devices have traditionally been used primarily in institutional environments because of their considerable size and operational complexity. Dry powder inhalers (DPIs) represent a significant advance in pulmonary delivery technology. For example, they are breath-actuated and so coordination problems such as synchronizing dose discharge with inhalation are overcome. DPIs are also potentially suitable for delivering a wider range of drugs than pMDIs, including biopharmaceutical systemic therapies such as peptides and proteins. Indeed, DPIs can deliver a range of doses from less than 10 mg to more than 20 mg via one short inhalation. There is a wide range of different types of DPI device already on the market or in development. The older devices (such as Rotahaler) discharge powder from a hard gelatin capsule inserted by the patient, but these are now being replaced by either multi-unit dose devices with blisters (such as Diskus and Spiros) or reservoir-type systems (such as Turbuhaler and Clickhaler). Pharmaceutical inhalation aerosols offer a distinct advantage of rapid delivery of drugs to the site of action as exemplified traditionally by the administration of bronchodilators for asthma treatment. More recently, driven by the pharmaceutical industry to explore the potential of the lungs for systemic treatment of diseases, pulmonary drug delivery by inhalation aerosols has been undergoing rapid development [1]. Significant research and development efforts have been put into dry powder aerosols, which require no propellant, have superior chemical stability compared with solution, and are easy of use (hence good patient compliance). Successful development of a dry powder aerosol delivery system requires careful considerations of: (i) production of the drug powder; (ii) formulation of the powder; and (iii) aerosol generation and delivery by the inhaler device, since all of these factors will affect deposition of an aerosol in the lungs. Recent research and development addressing the above issues will be discussed in this review. It is hoped that this article will not only provide the latest information on dry powder aerosols to the colloid and surface scientists who are


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