Encap is able to offer clients a range of colonic delivery systems (promoted under the name ENCODE^TM) This includes the Phloral^TM system licensed from the School of Pharmacy in London. This is a unique coating technology that is designed to target the release of drugs to the colon.

Recently, colonic drug delivery has gained increased importance, not just for treatment of local diseases associated with the colon, e.g. Crohn's disease, ulcerative colitis, colorectal cancer and IBS, but also for its potential suitability for the oral delivery of peptides and proteins, oligonucleotides and vaccines.
Existing colonic systems generally involve coating the dosage unit with polymeric materials that will not normally dissolve in the low pH of the stomach or upper intestine but will dissolve in the higher pH of the lower intestine. However, these have the potential to be unreliable due to patient variability in transit times and luminal pH.
The new Phloral^TM technology represents a significant improvement in colonic delivery providing ‘fail-safe' delivery of drug to the target site by employing two complimentary mechanisms to trigger drug release. As well as a pH dependant coating it also incorporates a component which is broken down specifically by the microbiota in the colonic region. The power of the new technology has been demonstrated in a recently published scintigraphic study in healthy volunteers (Ibekwe, Khela, Evans and Basit, Alimentary Phamacology & Therapeutics 28(7):911-6, 2008). Dosage units with the combination coating all disintegrated in the colonic area as desired whereas many units coated exclusively with a commercially available pH coating passed through the gastrointestinal tract intact and failed to disintegrate.

One of the drawbacks to colonic delivery is the relatively low amount of water that is available for dissolution of dosage forms in this part of the gastrointestinal tract. The combination of a reliable colonic targeting technology and the delivery of drugs in a liquid dosage form using Encap's liquid fill technologies may provide a significant advance for the delivery of a wide range of drugs to the colon.

For further information on colonic delivery, please contact us.