Prof Sarah Hudson. Image: © Roland Baege/Fotografie
University of Limerick’s Prof Sarah Hudson explains her work on drug delivery systems and the challenge of translating drug candidate research to real-world medicines.
A major part of the advancements in the future of health is the ongoing research around pharmaceuticals and changes to how drugs will be delivered to patients going forward. Prof Sarah Hudson is a researcher and senior lecturer in chemical sciences at University of Limerick (UL) who works in this area.
Hudson did her PhD in what was known at the time as the Materials and Surface Science Institute at UL, now the Bernal Institute. “While my PhD itself was in a different area, one of my supervisors at the time, Prof Kieran Hodnett, was very active in the crystallisation of organic molecules and went on to found the SSPC, the SFI research national centre for pharmaceuticals, which has been doing great work in pharmaceutical research for the last 16 years,” she told SiliconRepublic.com.
“After my PhD, I worked as a postdoctoral researcher with Prof Robert Langer at MIT in Boston in the area of drug delivery. When I returned to Ireland, I worked in Waterford Institute of Technology, now South-East Technological University, on an industrial project with Genzyme on an active polymeric ingredient.”
Hudson then returned to UL, where she became principal investigator in the SSPC research centre, bringing her experience in both crystallisation and drug delivery together with the aim to design medicines for more complex therapeutics.
Preparing for the next generation of drugs
Hudson’s own research focuses on developing drug delivery designs and novel drugs for future medicines. An improved drug delivery system within the body can mean a better response for patients. It could also allow for certain drug candidates to be manufactured in a more cost and energy-efficient way and allow them to be more widely available.
“The importance of delivery and formulation becomes critical as therapeutic molecules expand to include messenger RNA, enzymes, proteins and peptides to treat a wide range of diseases,” she said.
“I am also interested in making products that consider patient needs. As we all live longer and longer with chronic disorders and diseases, being able to take medicines in a way that gives us a good quality of life becomes really important.”
The advances in drug delivery have received much wider attention since the Covid-19 pandemic. Vaccines created using messenger RNA (mRNA) highlighted the value of this research and, according to Hudson, this brought the importance of drug delivery to the attention of the general public – but warned that it also led to misconceptions.
“There is a perception that this formulation and the lipid delivery system used were developed really quickly; they weren’t. When I was at MIT back in 2006, Dan Anderson and Bob Langer’s research groups were screening thousands of lipids to try to find the system that would successfully deliver mRNA into cells. That was nearly 20 years ago now,” she said.
“Continued investment in fundamental research on novel delivery technologies is critical for the more complex therapeutic molecules in development and will make sure we are ready for whatever new diseases or viruses come in the future.”
Translating drug candidates to usable medicines
While the groundbreaking work around vaccines during the pandemic showed some phenomenal advances in drug delivery, the complexity of drugs being developed is also something Hudson is very excited about.
“New drug targets have been identified through advances in understanding molecular pathology. This is fantastic and has improved the lives of many people. These therapeutics can be developed for specific cohorts of patients, minimising side effects and enabling treatments of complex diseases such as inflammatory diseases, cancer and immune disorders, as well as viral and microbial infections.”
However, while the research is exciting, translating drug candidates that can treat these diseases into actual medicines in the real world is poor and many proposed drug candidates fail at clinical trial stage due to their size, physicochemical properties and ability to get to where they need to be in the body.
Hudson said even when a drug candidate does well in clinical trials, there are the manufacturing costs to consider, as well as the manner in which they can be transported. “These complex drugs can be unstable, degrade at room temperature or can only be administered to patients by injection.”
In order to overcome these challenges, Hudson said it’s possible to play with a drug candidate’s molecular structure in such a way that improves stability or improves its distribution around the body. However, this can then lose the drug’s selectivity or activity within the body.
“The approach I like to take is to develop innovative drug delivery and formulation strategies to overcome the physicochemical properties of the active drug molecule,” she said.
“Innovative formulation approaches can overcome a number of key current challenges, such as poor targeting efficiency, poor aqueous solubility and/or permeability, manufacturing and storage/transport/stability challenges, and patient acceptability.”
Looking to the future, Hudson is very excited about mRNA and its potential to be used for diseases other than Covid-19. “I’m also really excited about designing more versatile delivery platforms where we can develop building blocks for delivery systems that can be tuned or tweaked for different therapeutic molecules, improving their effectiveness and designs to suit patient needs.”
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