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A Cambridge technology-academia partnership promises to help patients more easily absorb poorly soluble drugs administered orally via tablets or capsules.
TeraView, a pioneer and leader in terahertz technology and solutions has announced the progress in this arena as part of an ongoing UK collaboration with the University of Cambridge, which licensed the technology through Cambridge Enterprise, its commercialisation arm. The partnership looks set to provide a springboard to a strong commercial push.
The business has exclusively licensed a new university patent application pertaining to the formulation of drug ingredients using amorphous materials. This latest patent complements TeraView’s own portfolio of 10 granted patents in the pharmaceutical field which encompass intellectual property addressing tablets and drug formulation. The patent will assist TeraView’s collaborations with leading pharmaceutical companies, which is helping to improve the speed of drug formulation, as well as the lifetime of drug products and their efficiency of manufacture.
The inventors of the new patent are Dr Axel Zeitler and Dr Juraj Sibik, from the Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology at the University. Their invention is a new method of using terahertz spectroscopy to investigate the stability of amorphous materials, which can be used as active ingredients in drugs in the pharmaceutical industry.
Our long-standing relationship with TeraView and its position as the leading provider of terahertz solutions makes TeraView a natural partner to make our invention available to the wider industrial community.
Dr Axel Zeitler
Amorphous ingredients have the potential to increase bioavailability (absorption by the body) of poorly soluble drugs when administered orally in the form of tablets or capsules.
Dr Zeitler said: “Our work on amorphous materials has proven to be of interest to the scientific community in both its applications to materials science as well as the terahertz spectroscopy. We have also had substantial interest from pharmaceutical companies. Our long-standing relationship with TeraView and its position as the leading provider of terahertz solutions, means TeraView is a natural partner to make our invention available to the wider industrial community.”
The agreement strengthens TeraView’s position as the global leader in terahertz technology. It complements TeraView’s existing portfolio of internationally granted patents in the application of terahertz technology to the pharmaceutical sciences and industry. TeraView’s intellectual property includes the use of terahertz to aid in the development of new drug formulations and solid dosage forms, as well as quality assurance in production. TeraView patents address issues such as delamination in solid dosage forms, dissolution properties of tablets, tablet coating integrity which is important for many controlled release products, as well as the use of terahertz spectroscopy to detect and quantify different crystalline forms of drugs (polymorphism).
TeraView CEO Dr Don Arnone, said: “This agreement further solidifies our relationship with Dr Zeitler’s group and we are proud to be associated with his work and that of his team. This collaboration, where we have provided TeraView systems and other means of support, is a very good example of the sort of collaboration we seek to establish with world experts in their fields, such as Dr Zeitler.”