I have a confession to make: When I joined Tablets & Capsules in January 2022, I’m pretty sure I’d never heard the word “excipient”. If I had, I certainly couldn’t define it nor could I use it in a sentence.
It wasn’t that I was excipient-averse; it was more a case of following what SEEMED scientifically sexy. To most science journalists, that would be the active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) and the receptors to which they bind.
I’ve since grown an appreciation for excipients. Without them, things (well, definitely tablets) would certainly fall apart. They also might not reach the intended target, or not at the correct time. In 1999, when gene therapy was a hot—if largely theoretical therapeutic method—the joke was that there were three important challenges to making the approach successful: delivery, delivery, delivery.
Of course, that’s an overstatement, but with oral solid doses, getting the API to where it needs to go (and keeping it from deteriorating or going bad before it’s even administered—is pretty important, too.
We’ve devoted several features to excipients in this issue, because we feel that they are an important—and often overlooked—aspect of drug delivery. We look forward to following new trends in the field: from finding new uses for existing excipients to creating novel ones.
Paul Smaglik, Editor
psmaglik@comparenetworks.com