Use of biorelevant dissolution media in dissolution tests as a predictive method of oral bioavailability

Abstract Dissolution is a key step in the uptake of oral drugs. In order to compare the behaviour of the dissolution of two formulations, the dissolution profile test was used. This assay must be discriminative and should mimic in vivo conditions. Many dissolution media described in pharmacopoeias are not predictive of bioavailability. Due to this, biorelevant media are used as an alternative to solve this problem. The objective of this work is to evaluate the relevance of biorelevant dissolution media to predict in vivo drug dissolution. For this, a bibliographic search was carried out in scientific databases. The search was first performed for articles verifying the physicochemical properties of human gastrointestinal fluids. Subsequently, a comparison was made between the properties of gastrointestinal fluids and those of biorelevant and pharmacopoeial media. Finally, the results of bioequivalence studies and dissolution profile tests in biorelevant media described in the literature were compared. The results revealed that there are a few publications that have analysed some physicochemical properties of gastrointestinal fluids. In addition, high variability was observed for some properties. Regarding the comparison of these properties with pharmacopoeial media and biorelevant media, the analysis showed that the biorelevant media are more similar to gastrointestinal fluids than the pharmacopoeial media. Finally, the in vitro dissolution profile results were similar to the results obtained in vivo. Thus, biorelevant media may be useful for analysing dissolution profiles.