Na Li
University of Connecticut, CT·Pharmacology
Many promising new drug molecules dissolve poorly in water or pass poorly through the gut wall, so they are not well absorbed when swallowed. Special "enabling" formulations are designed to get around this.
- Fields
Pharmacology
Chemistry
Engineering
- Topics
oral drug delivery
drug formulation
enabling formulations
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through May 2029
What they work on
- Measure the particle drifting effect, where tiny drug particles aid absorption, in vitro and in vivo, and build mass transport and PBPK models to predict drug absorption from amorphous solid dispersions.
- Identify key factors that control de-supersaturation, the rate at which dissolved drug precipitates in the body, and develop in vitro surrogate tests and kinetic models that predict it.
- Evaluate particle drifting and de-supersaturation in lipid-based formulations, and use selected lipid excipients to enhance gut permeation and uptake into the lymphatic system.
More about the research
Developing them still relies on trial and error and on costly animal studies, so many good candidates are dropped early. Two steps in absorption remain poorly understood. One is the particle drifting effect, in which tiny drug particles and complexes help carry drug to the gut wall. The other is de-supersaturation, the rate at which dissolved drug falls back out of solution and can no longer be absorbed.
Why it matters
Better ways to predict how well a swallowed drug is absorbed could let more poorly soluble drug candidates make it through development. They could also reduce the number of animal pharmacokinetic studies and lower development costs. In turn, more medicines might reach patients at less financial burden.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
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University of Alabama, AL·Pharmacology
Synthesize polyesters with controlled topologies and use them to probe transcytosis, the ferrying of particles through cells, at the gut-blood barrier across in vitro, in vivo, and in silico experiments in preclinical species.
Shijie Cao
University of Washington, WA·Biomedical Engineering·Early-career
Engineer synthetic microbiome mimics: polymer nanoparticles that release bacterial metabolites and are coated with outer membrane vesicles from chosen bacterial strains, with core and shell varied independently to separate structural from metabolic signals.
Kim Brouwer
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC·Pharmacology
Identify drugs that change how hepatic transporters move within liver cells or alter their phosphorylation sites, and test how these changes affect transporter function, using an optimized in vitro liver cell system.
The school
University of Connecticut: 31 labs on PI Pages, $434M a year on research, 360 research doctorates a year.
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