Prediction of drug-packaging interactions via molecular dynamics (MD) simulations

The interaction between packaging materials and drug products is an important issue for the pharmaceutical industry, since during manufacturing, processing and storage a drug product is continuously exposed to various packaging materials. The experimental investigation of a great variety of different packaging material–drug product combinations in terms of efficacy and safety can be a costly and time-consuming task. In our work we used molecular dynamics (MD) simulations in order to evaluate the applicability of such methods to pre-screening of the packaging material-solute compatibility. The solvation free energy and the free energy of adsorption of diverse solute/solvent/solid systems were estimated. The results of our simulations agree with experimental values previously published in the literature, which indicates that the methods in question can be used to semi-quantitatively reproduce the solid-liquid interactions of the investigated systems.

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