Michael Stocker, University College Dublin applied for the Enterprise Ireland’s Commercialisation Fund programme, which was awarded as a Proof of Concept Study in Spring 2023 for the technology, Sencil.
Insufficient oral bioavailability significantly contributes to the rate of attrition of compounds in development and also constrains the range of chemical structures that can be accessed by medicinal chemists in the development of new drugs. Ionic liquids are an unusual class of compounds that can resolve the poor bioavailability of promising candidate molecules.
These issues can be overcome by deploying ILs in combination with APIs to form API-based ionic liquids (API-ILs), which results in much more favourable physicochemical properties without needing to modify the API structure. Whilst the potential of API-ILs has been identified in academia for some time, the technology has struggled to gain traction in the pharmaceutical industry.
This is largely due to the liquid or wax-like nature of API-ILs being far removed from what is generally considered acceptable when forming final drug products. Our technology, SEncIL, addresses this problem by transforming the challenging API-IL material into something easily handled by established process streams by employing a spray encapsulation process.
Furthermore, as SEncIL uses commonplace manufacturing processes, it holds the distinction of having both disruptive and familiar, de-risked, aspects. A patent application on the initial work was filed in August 2020 and this was followed by a Commercialisation Feasibility Study funded by Enterprise Ireland that ultimately informed the decision to apply for Enterprise Ireland’s Commercialisation Fund programme, which was awarded as a Proof of Concept Study in Spring 2023.
