Disordered drugs with high solubility are the aim of Marie Curie Fellow
Leonard Siebert has received 1.5 mill DKK from the EU in the prestigious Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship 2024 Call for the project DRUG-SPIN, working closely together with pharmaceutical expert Professor Thomas Rades.
Less environmental strain with more soluble drugs
One of the challenges with the consumption of drugs is that most of the pharmaceuticals are insoluble in water and pass through our bodies without being processed and accumulate in the environment. Leonard Siebert says: “The best option is to make drug dissolve easier, by bringing the pharmaceuticals into a disordered state called amorphous. From this state they can dissolve much more easily.
Thomas Rades is a highly recognized researcher dealing with these amorphous drugs and there are still a lot of open questions that cannot be answered easily because the techniques for producing disordered drugs are limited.”
In the project, Leonard Siebert will adapt a materials science technique called melt-spinning where molten drug is rapidly frozen into its disordered state on a rapidly spinning copper wheel. The speed dictates how fast the freezing happens, giving the researchers a valuable tool for studying the various disordered states and perhaps also enable the disordering of drugs that are currently too stable in their ordered state.
Leonard Siebert describes his field of interest: “I am a materials scientist and engineer, meaning, I have dealt with the production of new materials by novel techniques, like 3D printing, fiber spinning etc.
I am very passionate about materials engineering with a strong focus in the medical direction. Pharmacy is an important in life science and I want to expand my knowledge in that direction, applying it in life science and engineering in the future.”