Frontiers of Materials Science in Early Drug Development

The 2017 Preclinical Form and Formulation for Drug Discovery Gordon Research Conference will present cutting-edge research on evaluation of appropriate form and enabling formulations for drug candidates to facilitate the mechanistic understanding and development of drug delivery from drug discovery. New topics for this installment of the conference series will focus on cutting-edge characterization tools, emerging modes of production and delivery of pharmaceuticals including 3D printing and devices, advanced biophysical characterization tools and the materials science and engineering aspects of API-excipient interactions. The emerging area of mechano-chemistry as an enabling tool in early drug development will also be highlighted in a session.

The conference will bring together academic and industry leaders in pharmaceutical materials science, preclinical formulation science and bio-pharmaceutics in both the small molecule and biologics areas. Experts will share methodologies that enable the deep mechanistic insights into how different delivery systems work. Additionally, discussions will focus on ways that science and technology could transform the current state in this area and identify further knowledge gaps in scientific understanding and technological capabilities that can be explored and discussed at future conferences.

The conference will highlight topics on amorphous materials - with an emphasis on the science behind understanding the long-term stability and fundamental factors affecting the bio-performance of such enabling platforms. Methods that can improve physical properties of materials, novel formulations that can modulate delivery in a temporal manner, computational methodologies that can aid in predictions, and instrumentation technologies that can be leveraged to understand product performance, will also be explored.