Novel Polymer Helps Oral Medications Reach the Bloodstream, Virginia Tech Study

All too often, when a person takes a pill full of a potent and effective drug, the drug passes straight through the body, not reaching the organ where it is needed—a waste of money and inconvenient if it is a cold medicine, but potentially dire if it is a treatment for a serious illness. Polymer chemists at Virginia Tech and pharmaceutical scientists at Purdue University have teamed up to design a solution. Their research to identify, understand, and create new polymer additives that enhance the ability of orally administered drugs to reach the bloodstream has been published in a series of journals. In a special issue of the Elsevier journal Carbohydrate Polymers, they introduced an all-natural polymer that can be used with a range of medicines to prevent crystallization during transport and storage; it then traverses the digestive tract until the still fully potent medicine is released from the polymer in the small intestine, where it is best absorbed into the bloodstream.

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