Annette Bauer-Brandl´s research is driven by the vison of developing optimized medicines at reduced cost and effort and - most importantly - while respecting animal lives (3R). Her research area is thus biopharmaceutics, connecting properties of the drug substances and drug formulations with drug dissolution behaviour and up-take into the body.
Physico-chemical knowledge of the solid-state properties of drug substances (e.g. crystal structures, polymorphs, and co-crystals) and the solvation states of drug molecules in different physiological media are studied. For medical use, the pure drug substances are processed into various formulations. To evaluate their efficiency in vivo, the interplay of dissolution kinetics from the formulations and the transport into different compartments, e.g. absorption into the body, need to be balanced. For the latter process the research group has recently invented an artificial membrane that resembles the transport properties of biological absorption barriers.
Currently models for screening of new formulations for bioavailability are developed, amongst others a 96-well plate format for high throughput automated screening. It tremendously expands the experimental space for formulation testing and will help to find better formulations with less animal experiments.
See Annette Bauer-Brandl´s profile in the SDU research portal
