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Letters to the Editor
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Research
Historical details clarified
From Professor J. M. Newton, FRPharmS
I was interested to read Emma McConnell’s article “Employment
and situations vacant: new opportunities for colonic bacteria” (PJ,
22/29 December 2007, p722). I noticed that it was adapted from an essay
that was submitted to the 2007 Wellcome Trust and New Scientist essay
competition and delighted to see that the essay was awarded a prize.
I have not seen the original essay and my comments, therefore, may
not relate to what was written in the full essay but what was published
in The Pharmaceutical Journal.
As published, the article appears to imply that the findings are new
and that the approach was discovered at the School of Pharmacy, University
of London. Unfortunately, neither of these is strictly correct.
While the School of Pharmacy has been involved for some time now, the
concept of using systems which are resistant to digestion by human amylases
but digestible by bacterial amylases actually came from work at the MRC
Dunn Institute of Clinical Nutrition, Cambridge, in the 1980s, on resistant
starches.
The idea of applying this to pharmaceutical systems came from the then
research pharmacist at Addenbrooke’s Hospital (M. C. Allwood) and
the Dunn. The first approach involved the use of resistant starch in
the form of “glassy amylose”, which was prepared by the Institute
of Food Research, Norwich.
The work to ensure that this system could be coated onto a pharmaceutical
formulation, required a mixed film and did in fact function in the manner
described in the essay by Ms McConnell (ie, pass undigested through the
stomach and small intestine and release the drug in the large intestine
due to the digestion by the colonic bacteria) was undertaken at the School
of Pharmacy in conjunction with the MRC Dunn Institute of Clinical Nutrition,
the Institute of Food Research and Addenbrooke’s Hospital.
The results were described in 1996 by Cummings et al,1 ie,
more than 10 years ago and it is the approach used by these workers which
forms
the basis of the preparation referred to in the essay as “in phase
III clinical trials”. The work was a multidisciplinary project
with workers from the four different sites contributing to the success
of the project. (Two of the 11 authors of this paper were from the School
of Pharmacy.)
The publication was the first paper to show that a coating
system could be used to provide a specific colon drug delivery in humans.
As mentioned in the article, there are now several alternative systems,
not all from the School of Pharmacy, which employ this approach.
There is nothing in the article that is incorrect, just the omission
of a few details. My comments do not change the concepts of the article
but having been part of the events, I wished to clarify the history
of what actually occurred in terms of the process of where the concept
was
derived and the time scale.
J. M. Newton
London
Reference
1. Cummings JH, Milojevic S, Harding M et al. In vivo studies of amylose
and ethyl cellulose-coated [13C] glucose microspheres as a model for
drug delivery to the colon. Journal of Controlled Release 1996;40:123–31. |
The
Pharmaceutical Journal