Pharmaceutical Emulsions A Drug Developer’s Toolbag
The primary target audience for this text is students engaged in MPharm and professional practice modules, pharmacy technician or internal formulation and NPD courses and MScs in industrial pharmacy, PGDip industrial pharmaceuti-cal studies and related themes. Most schools of pharmacy have about 40–160 of these students per cohort. Yet the book must simultaneously be pertinent to MRess, MScs, PhDs and postdocs (and BScs) in ‘pharmaceutical’ sciences. It is thus specialist yet generalist, to the point of not simply being a collection of research papers, but instead a teaching/training text. In light of this, the book is not targeted exclusively at either the undergraduate, the advanced researcher or the experienced industrialist. It will be seen by industrial pharmacists (phar-maceutical scientists, chemists, engineers, etc) as generalist, and for real subject experts it merely represents a referential ‘pocket guide’ and not an encyclopaedic reference manual. Unlike many colloid and dispersions books, this text is not generalist in the sense of application universality and it is exclusively written for those involved with pharmaceutical emulsions (a ‘hot’ topic, to quote one reviewer). In this sense, it has absolute value and novelty in terms of being rather specific. Many other books are available which elaborate theory and physics or physical chemistry background (e.g. Adamson, 1990; Hiemenz and Rajagopalan, 1997; Goodwin, 2000 and more recent editions). In principle, this book is primar-ily targeted at pharmacists, pharmaceuticists, medics and pharmacologists, and its form alludes to this in a significant manner.
I started my involvement with ‘colloids’ (now ‘nanotechnology’ in current ‘in-speak’) as an undergraduate dealing with industrial dispersions, then as a mas-ters’ chemical engineering student dealing with fabrication. During a physics PhD and numerous postdocs I had the pleasure to work with and in research groups in the UK, France, Germany and Italy, where dispersions (foams, thin liquid films and emulsions) were the mainstay of the target product or the vehicle for mechanistic elucidation. Dispersions investigated included model food foams and emulsions, liquid ion-exchange systems, theoretical and mechanistic models and industrial products of a food, automotive, petrochemical and medicinal nature. I have had the great luck to have worked and collaborated with some truly great thinkers and international colloid celebrities: Peter Wilde, David Clark, Jim Mingins, Vic Morris, Brian Robinson, Eric Dickinson, Monique Axelos, Yves Popineau, Daniel Bonn, Jacques Meunier, Vance Bergeron, Zdravko Lalchev, Reinhard Miller, J¨urgen Kr¨agel, Clive Washington, Seyed Moghimi, Vladimir Torchilin and Sandy Florence, to name but a few. Today, and for the last decade or more, most of my interest has been in pharmaceutical dispersions. Coarse emulsions (hereafter simply referred to as ‘emulsions’), nanoemulsions, micelles – simple, reverse and swollen – are the building blocks and centre points of nanomedicine, the pharma-ceutical and therapeutic environment and modelling of drug encapsulation, new product design (nanoparticle drug delivery systems), increased efficacy and dosage miniaturisation, interfacial sculpting and molecular nanoengineering.
My research expertise, on which this book is founded, traverses areas of bio-physics, material sciences, pharmaceutics and biopharmaceutics, food science, chemical engineering, physical chemistry, rheology and polymer science, medic-inal chemistry, chemical biology, engineering, industrial product design and reg-ulation and analytical chemistry. For teaching, I use a wide variety of books or chapters, and there are a number of really good pharmaceutics textbooks, but their main failings for pharmacy students is that they traverse year one to year four basic
concepts such as pKa and log D and feature only one chapter (generalist) dealing with the pivotal role of ‘emulsions’ in medical products (therapeutics) sciences. I hope to expand on this information without providing a cost-restrictive or exces-sively detailed text and to focus entirely upon the dispersed particle or particle within matrix technologies, which is perhaps better suited for students with some basic primary experience or knowledge of pharmacy dispersions. Using many figures and tables is the chosen, I have attempted to provide a summary of the salient facts and thus keep the text short. As with all things, there is a compromise to be made between what we know and would like to say and the restrictions of time and the funds available in the student’s pocket. I hope students and profes-sionals alike will find the book useful, suitably informative and yet portable and readable.
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