From tablets and patches to ointments and infusions, the best way to deliver a drug is the one that gets the right amount to the right place.
While pills come in many shapes and sizes, they all eventually reach your bloodstream and travel throughout your body. Vadim Sazhniev/iStock via Getty Images
Pharmaceutical products contain more than just the active drug that directly affects the body. Medications also include “inactive ingredients,” or molecules that enhance the stability, absorption, flavor and other qualities that are critical to allowing the drug to do its job. For example, the aspirin you swallow also has ingredients that both prevent the tablet from fracturing during shipping and help it break apart in your body.
How drugs are absorbed in the bodyWhen you swallow a tablet, it will initially dissolve in your stomach and intestines before the drug molecules are absorbed into your bloodstream. Once in the blood, it can circulate throughout the body to access different organs and tissues. Getting drugs to the right placeCompared with pills and tablets, a more efficient way of getting a drug into the blood is to inject it directly into a vein. This way, all the drug gets circulated throughout the body and avoids degradation in the stomach.
In other cases, drugs that need very high concentrations to be effective, such as antibiotics for severe infections, can be delivered only through infusion. While increasing drug concentration can help make sure enough molecules are binding to the correct sites to have a therapeutic effect, it also increases binding to nontarget sites and the risk of side effects.
Because remembering to take a drug several times a day is difficult for many people, researchers try to design drug formulations so they need to be taken only once a day or less.
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