PY1 Review - Pharmaceutics

As the keepers of tablets, capsules and suppositories, pharmacists must obviously understand how these products are manufactured and deliver medicines to the body.  That class is called pharmaceutics and is unique to the field of pharmacy.  We took two semesters worth of information for one of the most interesting classes we had during the PY1 year.

Determining the route of administration of a drug is just as important as choosing the right drug.  If a person has diabetes, as many people do, we want to give them insulin.  A lot of other medicines work as well, but insulin remains the standard.  So how do you get the insulin into the body?  Most people know about insulin injections - a subcutaneous administration of an endogenous protein.  But 3-4 injections a day adds up quickly to 21-28 a week or 1,095-1,460 injections per year.  What if we could devise a better way to deliver insulin without a needle?  That is pharmaceutics.

The most common method of taking medicines today are pills.  Pills, pills, pills.  Patients taking 30 or 40 per day.  Tablets can be different sizes and different shapes.  The type of oral medication depends on the aspects of the drug itself.  Some drugs degrade in low pH, like in the stomach.  In that case, you don't want the drug released until it gets into the small intestines.  Enteric coating can protect drug by not dissolving in the stomach.  A lot of science goes into designing the right pill.  A lot more goes into making the pill stable as some sit in boxes for 2 years from manufacture to your mouth.  We talked a lot about the excipients added to medications and the testing process each product must go through.

Unfortunately, great pills don't always deliver all of the medicine through the digestive system.  The amount that actually gets through to your body determines the bioavailability.  Some oral products have very low bioavailability, but the gold standard will always be intravenous injection.  If pills are complicated to make, IVs have their own problems.  Producing IV meds involves a lot of thought in stability and sterility.  Hospitals have giant clean rooms to prepare IVs to reduce the likelihood of contamination.  Even then, a drug in saline solution may only be stable for a few hours before precipitating into a useless cloudy mess.

I really liked both semesters of pharmaceutics.  The topics were interesting and the wide range of professors provided a lot of entertainment.  Pharmaceutics seems like one of the secrets kept by the pharmacists from the other health care professionals.  You can take this subject with you to counseling patients in the community, to preparing IV bags in a hospital, or to developing a new billion dollar drug in the industry.