The Titanic sank in 1912. In the same year, and as a consequence of this, a competition was prompted to discover and develop non-visual methods for detection of icebergs. This led to the echo sounding technique that became known as SONAR (SOund Navigation And Ranging). In 1917 it was found that severe erosion of ships propellers at fast spinning rate was a result of localized cavitational bubble collapse. These events paved the way for the emergence of ultrasound as a tool in many areas of science, engineering and medicine. Many will be familiar with the use of ultrasound in diverse fields such as medical imaging, physiotherapy and SONAR (some might wrongly say toothbrushes!). At Prosonix we use our own high intensity ultrasonic technologies - much lower frequencies than in medical foetal scanning or physiotherapy for example - for making better medicines. We do this by applying state-of-the-art ultrasound processing to the active ingredients that make up our everyday medicines.

For many drug particles the usual method of manufacture involves taking large crystals and physically breaking them into smaller drug particles. Prosonix technologies allow manufacture of particles that are grown, or engineered, to the right size from the smallest building blocks - the molecules of the drug substance in question.

For oral delivery we can manufacture the drug ingredients with higher purity, increased stability and improved performance when being formulated as tablets of capsules. For newer medicines, whilst well-designed to alleviate illness and disease symptoms, they can be very insoluble in water. 

In many instances it is appropriate to make the drug particles as small as possible in order to improve the rate at which they can dissolve in the stomach and thereby do what they were designed to do. This can also apply to certain injectable drugs where you require the drug to dissolve in the bloodstream - but as you can imagine the poorly soluble particles must be very small! If not, the drug particles may not dissolve very well and will be excreted from the body without doing much good. We can use our technology to make drug nanoparticles, with a diameter 100 x less than that of a human hair, for preparation in water based suspensions for oral or injection delivery.

For those who suffer from asthma, cystic fibrosis and even lung cancer, small particles for inhaled medicines can be made by Prosonix technologies. In order to reach the right place in the upper (for asthma, COPD) or lower (antibiotics for example) airways of the lung the particles must be around 1 -5 micron sized or with a diameter around 20 x less than that of a human hair. It is important that for asthma sufferers the particles are prepared so that when released from the inhaler they arrive into the lung and don't simply fall on to the tongue and then swallowed. Of course they must get out of the inhaler in the first place. That is where Prosonix delivers improvement in asthma inhaler performance and give consistent relief to the patient. For asthma our ‘engineered' bronchodilators and steroids - 2 very well known and complementary drug components in everyday inhalers - for dramatically alleviating the awful problems caused by asthma and other respiratory diseases' such as COPD - are ground-breaking and are set to revolutionise treatment for these medical problems.

These two drugs complement (synergy) each other in the lung - the bronchodilator opens the airways and the steroid reduces inflammation. For example many asthma and COPD sufferers use Seretide / Advair from GSK and Symbicort from AstraZeneca. However it is important that the 2 medicines arrive in the lung together to have maximum effects. Prosonix technologies ensure that, when manufactured by our methods, the 2 components arrive together because the have been prepared together and can be seen as one - they chaperone each other to the site of action. Unfortunately the standard technique of dry blending means that they don't always arrive together and some particle don't arrive at all!

Prosonix technologies will deliver better medicines now and in the future. Refer our website to friends and colleagues or contact the Prosonix team for further information.