Drug-eluting implants

The title of my talk is going to be drug-eluting implants. My name is Aliasger K. Salem. I'm the Bighley Chair and Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of Iowa College of Pharmacy.

With this presentation, I'm going to talk about drug-eluting implants and how they can provide sustained drug delivery. In the field of drug delivery, the most commonly used treatments have traditionally traditionally been systemic delivered drugs using oral or intravenous administration. The problems associated with this type of delivery is that the drug concentration is controlled by first-class metabolism. Therefore, may not always remain within the therapeutic window. Implantable drug delivery systems, which during this talk we will also refer to as IDDs, are an excellent alternative to traditional delivery because they offer the ability to precisely control the drug release, deliver drugs locally to the target tissue, and avoid the toxic side effects often experienced with systemic administration. Since the creation of the first FDA approved IDDS in 1990, there has been a surge in research devoted to fabricating and testing novel IDDS formulations. The versatility of these systems is evident when looking at the various biomedical applications that utilize IDDSs. In this presentation, I'm going to give some detailed examples of IDDs and how they work, and I'm going to talk about their advantages, their disadvantages and then give an overview of future prospects. When it comes to long-acting drug delivery formulations, the advantages of long-acting formulations over conventional dosage forms include the ability to avoid sharp fluctuations in drug concentration, avoid sub-therapeutic/toxic doses and improve patient compliance and adherence to treatment. If you look at this graph for an example, you can see that when you're giving single dose, immediate release formulations, you have periods where you're above that minimum safe concentration, periods where you're below the minimum effective concentration and periods of time where you're within that ideal region. If you have a sustained release formulation or a zero-order controlled release formulation, you can stay within that range that is always below the minimum safe concentration and above the minimum effective concentration, which is an ideal profile for a sustained release formulation. The types of drug-eluting implants that are available