Intranasal Delivery of Peptide Therapeutics: Challenges and Strategies
Jose Tlaxca
Scientist, MedImmune
Intranasal drug delivery is an attractive noninvasive route of administration for therapeutic proteins and peptides. It addresses hurdles commonly faced by other routes of delivery: avoids first-pass metabolism by the liver, enzymatic activity in the GI tract, drug degradation, slow absorption and poor bioavailability. Solid formulations offer the potential to eliminate preservatives (commonly used in liquid formulations) and cold chain requirements, potentially offering long term stability for room temperature storage and shipping. Since it is expensive and time consuming to characterize particle deposition in the nasal cavity in vivo, one alternative approach is to use in vitro nasal models to evaluate nasal formulations and delivery technologies.
Jose is currently employed at MedImmune (AstraZeneca's biologics arm) in the drug delivery and device development group, supporting the growing pipeline with a wide range of medical devices.