Development
Before these patches go into the market, they have to be carefully studied. One way to study these patches are through the use of Franz Diffusion Cell systems. This system is used to study the effects of temperature on the permeated amount of a specific drug on a certain type of membrane, which in this case would be the membrane that is used in the patches. A Franz Diffusion Cell system is composed of a receptor and a donor cell. In many of these research studies the following procedure is used. The donor cell is set at a specific temperature (the temperature of the environment ), while the receptor cell is set at different one (temperature of the body).
Different runs are performed using different temperatures to study the impact of temperature on the release of a certain medicament through a certain type of membrane. Although different concentrations of the medicament are used in this study, they do not affect the amount permeated through the membrane (the process is constant). From Chemical kinetics it’s concluded that these studies are zero order, since the concentration plays no role in the permeated amount through the membrane.
Some pharmaceuticals must be combined with substances, such as alcohol, within the patch to increase their ability to penetrate the skin in order to be used in a transdermal patch. Others can overwhelm the body if applied in only one place, and are often cut into sections and applied to different parts of the body to avoid this, such as nitroglycerin. Many molecules, however, such as insulin, are too large to pass through the skin without it being modified in some way. Several new technologies are being investigated to allow larger molecules to be delivered transdermally.
Read more about this topic: Transdermal Patch
Famous quotes containing the word development:
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—John Emerich Edward Dalberg, 1st Baron Acton (1834–1902)
“This was the Eastham famous of late years for its camp- meetings, held in a grove near by, to which thousands flock from all parts of the Bay. We conjectured that the reason for the perhaps unusual, if not unhealthful development of the religious sentiment here, was the fact that a large portion of the population are women whose husbands and sons are either abroad on the sea, or else drowned, and there is nobody but they and the ministers left behind.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“They [women] can use their abilities to support each other, even as they develop more effective and appropriate ways of dealing with power.... Women do not need to diminish other women ... [they] need the power to advance their own development, but they do not “need” the power to limit the development of others.”
—Jean Baker Miller (20th century)