Researchers at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, led by Professor Lei Xu from the Department of Physics, have developed an innovative drug formulation method to tackle the issue of poor solubility—a common barrier to the effectiveness of many medicines. This breakthrough could significantly enhance drug efficacy and accessibility across various therapeutic areas.

The technique is cost-effective, applicable to a broad range of drugs, and scalable for mass production. It also uses biocompatible materials, making it a promising platform for next-generation drug delivery.

Croucher News caught up with Professor Xu to find out more.

What inspired your team to focus on drug solubility and develop this specific method using silica nanosurfaces? I’m a physicist, and I found that many oral drugs are quite insoluble. This is a major pain point for the drug industry, and thus I want to find a general solution from fundamental physics. Silica is a biocompatible material and exists in various food and drug products, so I plan to use it to develop our technology. Can you explain, in simple terms, how the competitive adsorption process works and why it improves drug solubility? The basic principle is quite simple. The silica surface has a strong adsorption to both drug molecules and water molecules. Under dry conditions, the drug molecules will adsorb to the surface, forming a composite material which is stable for long-term storage. However, after we put it into water, the water molecules also want to bind to the surface, making a competition with the drug molecules already on the surface. Because there are plenty of water molecules whose affinity to the surface is stronger than the drug molecules, water will replace the drug molecules and make them disperse in water. Thus, we can achieve solubility enhancement by 1 to 3 orders of magnitude. What types of drugs or medical conditions could benefit most from this new technology? Many drugs that are insoluble can benefit from our technology, including anti-cancer drugs, non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, etc. How does your method compare to existing drug formulation technologies in terms of cost, scalability, and effectiveness? Compared to current formulation technologies, our technology is much cheaper than most existing formulation technologies, easy to scale up, and exhibits high effectiveness. More importantly, it is generally applicable to many drugs. Thus, it has the potential to replace multiple formulation techniques and become the next-generation platform technology for drug formulation. What challenges remain before this technology can be widely adopted in the pharmaceutical industry, and what’s next for your research? The challenge is to test our technology with new drug candidates currently under development. We are working with some pharma company to test our technology. The next step is to collaborate with industrial partners and test and improve our technology with new drug candidates.

The findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences with Dr Zhuo Xu as the first author and Professor David Weitz from Harvard University as a corresponding author along with Professor Xu.