Effective Screening of Chemical Penetration Enhancers for Transdermal Drug Delivery

The potency of a CPE in enhancing the permeation of a drug is usually determined by quantifying the amount of drug permeated through skin in the presence of the CPE. Typically, these experiments are performed in Franz diffusion cells, and the amount of drug permeated is quantified by using rigorous analytical techniques, which are resource and labor intensive, cost prohibitive and have limited throughput. Further, there is no rational design in the criteria for selecting candidate CPEs for study and this trial-and-error method can be time consuming. Therefore, a need exists for a robust, quick alternate technique that can effectively pre-screen the CPEs for their potency. In this study, resistive properties of skin were used to determine the potency of the CPEs. A high throughput multi-well resistance chamber was designed and constructed in order to increase the throughput from the experiments. The multi-well resistance chambers were equipped to perform the experiments at conditions identical to permeation experiments and forty two potential CPEs were evaluated, which were generated by virtual design techniques. Histological studies were also performed to test the toxic effects of selected potent CPEs.School of Chemical Engineerin