Abstract:

In recent decades pharmaceutics and drug delivery have become increasingly critical in the pharmaceutical industry due to longer time, higher cost, and less productivity of new molecular entities (NMEs). However, current formulation development still relies on traditional trial-and-error experiments, which are time-consuming, costly, and unpredictable.

With the exponential growth of computing capability and algorithms, in recent ten years, a new discipline named “computational pharmaceutics” integrates with big data, artificial intelligence, and multi-scale modeling techniques into pharmaceutics, which offered great potential to shift the paradigm of drug delivery. Computational pharmaceutics can provide multi-scale lenses to pharmaceutical scientists, revealing physical, chemical, mathematical, and data-driven details ranging across pre-formulation studies, formulation screening, in vivo prediction in the human body, and precision medicine in the clinic. Several formulation cases in the area will be discussed, such as solid dispersion, microsphere and mRNA lipid nanoparticle.

Speaker: (Defang Ouyang)

Prof. Ouyang has a multidisciplinary background in pharmaceutics & computer modelling, with experience in academia and industry. He obtained his bachelor (2000) and master (2005) in pharmaceutics from Shenyang Pharmaceutical University, China. He completed his PhD in pharmacy at The University of Queensland, Australia, in 2010 and progressed directly to his faculty position (Lecturer in Pharmaceutics, PI) at Aston University (UK). From the end of 2014, he moved to the University of Macau. 

Since 2011, he has pioneered the integration of multi-scale modeling, artificial intelligence and big data techniques in the field of drug delivery – “computational pharmaceutics“. He has published 2 books, 5 book chapters, over 80 refereed SCI journal papers, and over 100 invited talks. He held 11 approved patents, which had been used in medicinal products. He edited the first book <Computational Pharmaceutics - the application of molecular modeling in drug delivery> (John Wiley & Sons Inc., 2015) in this research area. He serves as the associate editor /editorial board of <Drug Delivery and Translational Research>, <Asian Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences>, <Pharmaceutical Research>, <Pharmaceutics> and <Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences>. He is establishing the first global artificial intelligence (AI)-based formulation platform (FormulationAI). He successfully trained 6 PhD and 30 master students.

His research focused on computational pharmaceutics, including:

• Artificial intelligence (AI) of pharmaceutical formulations: to build the database of pharmaceutical formulations and predict pharmaceutical formulations by machine learning approaches;
• Multi-scale modeling in drug delivery: to integrate quantum mechanics (QM), molecular dynamics (MD) and physiologically based pharmacokinetic (PBPK)  modeling into drug delivery systems;
• Pharmacoinformatics: big data analysis of pharmaceutical information from the literature, patent, clinical trial and marketed products.

Contact Details

Institute of Chinese Medical Sciences SKL of Quality Research in Chinese Medicine University of Macau, N22 Avenida da Universidade, Taipa, Macau

Tel: +853-8822-4514

Email: defangouyang@um.edu.mo