Formulation of pharmaceuticals and drug discovery is an important research area in Sweden with world leading pharmaceutical companies as main actors in the country. State of the art characterisation is an essential component for driving understanding of structure-function relationships and to increase understanding of biological processes. These are essential for rational design and maximising therapeutic efficacy.

Neutron scattering can be used to characterise these systems under near physiological conditions (concentration, solvents, temperature) to provide fundamental information on biomedicines including pharmaceutical formulations, protein structure and targets for drug discovery. This information can be used to produce guidelines including formulation optimisation and target design for drug discovery.

Most neutron facilities have dual access routes for academic and industrial partners enabling full confidentiality where necessary. Moreover, many academic research groups work together with the Life Science and pharmaceutical Swedish industry. Some examples of Swedish research in this area can be found here:

Formulation of Liposomes in pharmacy, by Molly Steves group at Karolinska Institute
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Using common cations such as calcium and sodium to trigger ethanol-induced lipid membrane interdigitation, which can be leveraged to formulate lipid nanocarriers with unilamellar morphologies also by Molly Steves group at Karolinska Institute.
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The structure of lipid based nanoparticles for gene delivery, by AstraZeneca Pharmaceutical Science, Advanced Drug Delivery
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And how they are affected by serum protein binding by Marité Cárdenas' group in collaboration with AstraZeneca.
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Nanovehicles for delivery of antimicrobial compounds in pharmacy,
by RISE (Maja Hellsing) and Chalmers Technological University (Martin Andersson)
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by Tommy Nylander’s group at Lund University.
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Protein crystallisation for structural determination, including role of protein dynamics during crystallisation by Felix Roosen-Runge at Malmö University and his collaborators in Germany and France.
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Multiscale characterization of lipid nanocarriers is essential for structure function relationships and to move towards rational design of enzyme responsive lipid pharmaceuticals.
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