Most of you have undoubtedly taken medication at some point in your life. Many medications, including tablets, capsules, syrups, and lozenges, are taken orally.
Even though oral medication is one of the most popular forms of treatment since it is affordable and simple to use, it has a complicated drawback. The human body has a difficult time absorbing active medicinal ingredients when taken orally. This is due to the fact that the medication’s bioavailability (pace and degree of absorption) depends on its constituent parts and the constantly changing physiological milieu of the stomach.
Posture could impact how well medications work.
In order to better understand how this affects drug bioavailability, researchers from Johns Hopkins University and the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine have carried out a study. According to the news release, they employed a “StomachSim,” a biomimetic in-silico simulator based on the accurate architecture and shape of the stomach.
The co-author of the study, Rajat Mittal, said that while being the most used method of drug delivery, oral administration is unexpectedly complicated. “The motion of the stomach walls and the movement of its contents when the pill enters the stomach dictate how quickly it dissolves. The characteristics of the tablet and the contents of the stomach are also quite important.”
It is difficult to comprehend how the dissolution is impacted by various stomach illnesses, such as gastroparesis, which slows down the emptying of the stomach, because existing experimental or clinical approaches for assessing the dissolution of oral medications are limited in their ability to examine this.
Additionally important elements that affect a drug’s bioavailability are stomach contents, motility, and gastric fluid dynamics. Additionally, the pressure that is produced by stomach contractions can affect the trajectory of the pills. This results in irregular pill dissolution rates, non-uniform drug release into the duodenum (the first section of the small intestine), and, in the case of modified-release dose, even gastric dumping. All of them present different design challenges for drug delivery.
a framework for computer simulation that can get beyond restrictions
We demonstrate a revolutionary computer simulation platform that has the potential to get around these restrictions in this work, said Mittal. Our models can produce biorelevant data on medication dissolving that can offer practical and original insights into the intricate physiological processes involved in pill delivery when taken orally.
By combining stomach biomechanics with pill movement and drug dissolution, this modeling is the first of its type to measure an active medicinal ingredient traveling past the pylorus into the duodenum. It may open the door for researchers to compute and compare the rate of release of an active medicinal ingredient dissolved in a gastrointestinal fluid into the duodenum under varied physiological conditions.