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An invention by a team of researchers at UWA is in the process of revolutionising the delivery of everyday drugs around the world.

Matt Callahan is CEO of iCeutica - a company whose catchphrase is ‘making drugs better'. Working with scientists at UWA he and a handful of colleagues set out to identify a problem that needed solving: the inability of many drugs to dissolve properly, thus delaying their benefits or requiring huge doses that also caused bigger side effects.

In 2003 collaborators Dr Trevor Payne, Professor Paul McCormick, Dr James Williams and Dr Aaron Dodd decided to work out how to improve a select number of commercially successful drug compounds.

Supported by a UWA Pathfinder grant of $40,000 for proof-of-concept projects, the group developed a patent application for a way to make nano-size particles of drugs. The resultant drug particles were about one thousand times smaller than the width of a human hair and dissolved much faster than the commercial products.

This grant was awarded by the University's technology transfer arm, the Office of Industry and Innovation, which negotiated a licensing and option deal the following year.

By placing the drug - the first one they tried was Voltaren - in a mill about the size of a can of Coca Cola filled with ballbearings, and electronically shaken, they were able to reduce the size of the particles to less than 100 nanometres (1nm is one-billionth of a metre).

"In improving the dissolution of pharmaceuticals, you produce several benefits," Mr Callahan said. "Better dissolution means the drug is much more effective. You can therefore reduce the amount of drug the patient has to take, thus lessening the side-effects. The drug works much faster and there is no need to take it with food, often a requirement and a problem in traditional drug delivery. You also reduce the waste that accompanies the manufacture of drugs.

"We don't change the chemical composition of any of the drugs we are working with. We just make them dissolve better and more quickly.

"With Iroko Pharmaceuticals, our US partner, we have scaled up the technology, from using a mill the size of a Coke can to one about the size of a washing machine," Mr Callahan said.

"We've undertaken clinical trials of three products, all of which have passed first and second phase."

iCeutica will continue to carry out research to develop a method to enable the use of some of the 40 per cent of drugs that are developed internationally, but never marketed because they don't dissolve well.

Mr Callaghan said the group came up with the name iCeutica before iPods came on the market. The ‘i' means little and the ‘ceutica' means drugs.

Director of UWA's Office of Industry and Innovation, Dr Andy Sierakowski, said the success of iCeutica was a great example of facilitating technology transfer from the University to the private sector.

"Not only has this UWA technology been developed to provide real-life patient benefits, the relationship between UWA and iCeutica has flourished via an oncampus research presence including joint Australian Research Council-Linkage projects," Dr Sierakowski said.

Published in UWA News , 8 August 2011