Researcher Lynne S. Taylor, Ph.D. Discusses Her Research at Purdue University
By Mark Crawford
Lynne S. Taylor, Ph.D. earned her Bachelor of Pharmacy from the University of Bath and her doctorate from the University of Bradford in the United Kingdom. She joined Purdue University in 2003 and currently serves as the Retter Professor of Pharmacy in the Department of Industrial and Physical Pharmacy.
Taylor’s research focuses on the molecular aspects of drug delivery and formulation, including phase transformations, solid dispersions and amorphous systems, physical and chemical stability of pharmaceutics, and water-solid interactions.
“Our goal is to enhance the delivery, efficacy, and safety of drugs,” says Taylor. “Supersaturation, absorption, crystallization, and crystallization inhibition are important phenomena impacting the bioavailability of drugs.”
Her work toward developing new strategies to improve oral delivery of poor water-soluble drugs has significantly advanced this aspect of the pharmaceutics field. Taylor’s lab is exploring the fundamental science underlying the pre-formulation, formulation, and manufacturing of drugs and drug/nutraceutical/food products. She collaborates with other academic groups as well as scientists working in industry. The National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, United States Department of Agriculture, and various pharmaceutical and food companies have all funded her research. Taylor is especially interested in how to enhance solubility and improve oral bioavailability. “Stability of drugs and other bioactives such as vitamins in formulations, both solid state and chemical stability, especially in response to temperature and relative humidity, is another area of active interest,” she notes.
Teacher, Researcher, Editor
Taylor and her students are intently focused on understanding how amorphous solid dispersions release drugs, specifically by evaluating the role of the polymer.
“To date, we have found that the polymer is instrumental in controlling the rate of drug release at low drug loadings,” she says. “As the drug loading increases, the release can ‘fall off a cliff’ with some polymers, leading to diminished ability to dissolve the drug.” This is highly dependent on the drug and her team is starting to gain some clarity about the interplay between drug and polymer properties, and ultimately how this impacts the release of the drug.
“A more fundamental understanding of this process will let us design better solubility-enhancing formulations, hopefully without having to use large amounts of excipients,” she says.
In 2019 Taylor became editor-in-chief of the ACS journal Molecular Pharmaceutics, which has been a highly rewarding and enjoyable experience. “This job has really opened my eyes to the breadth of research being conducted in the pharmaceutical sciences and how globalized the pharmaceutical sciences are,” Taylor says. “I especially enjoy interacting with a broader group of scientists than I normally come into contact with, including authors, editors, and reviewers for the journal.”
Motivation and Leadership
For Taylor, leadership is about providing the motivation to tackle difficult problems in pharmaceutics, and then allowing people to have the freedom to explore their ideas. “This approach has allowed my group members to be successful in their research and move our research program forward,” she states. “It is very important to let people explore their own ideas, take ownership for them, and make mistakes along the way.”
She also emphasizes to be open to new ideas, especially those that do not quite fit current thinking or seem to make compete sense.
“When I was younger, I thought I knew a lot about my research area,” she remembers. “I quickly learned that there were plenty of unanswered questions, and that observations that seemed weird were often the most interesting ones to follow up. This has taken us in some interesting directions in the lab.” For example, her team noticed that some of its formulations produced cloudy solutions when added to water. The cloudiness turned out to be due to nanodroplets that were formed spontaneously by the formulations when added to water. “We later discovered that formation of these nanodroplets seems to improve absorption in vivo,” says Taylor.
Research Opportunities Abound
Networking is an effective way to find new research interests and collaborators. For example, being an active member of the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists (AAPS) provides plenty of opportunities to lead committees and develop new relationships, which can translate into research collaborations down the road.
Attending AAPS annual meetings provided Taylor with very important networking opportunities, especially when she was a graduate student. “Networking is one reason I think that the poster sessions are so valuable, especially for early career scientists,” she says. “I received a lot of really important feedback from prominent scientists at poster sessions and still remember many of these interactions to this day.”
Taylor has an abundance of research to keep her busy. Currently her lab is learning more about supersaturation and crystallization of drugs under biorelevant conditions. This includes trying to understand the interplay between processing conditions and product performance for amorphous formulations. Pharmaceutical salt stability and excipient functionality are also key topics. “We have also been working on the preparation of individualized dosage forms using drop-on-demand printing, as well as high resolution analytical techniques to explore bulk and surface characteristics,” states Taylor.
Other aspects her team is exploring include:
- Stabilization of amorphous solid dispersions against crystallization
- Miscibility in amorphous solid dispersions
- Novel polymers to stabilize amorphous solids
- Improving amorphous solid dispersion drug loading
- Second harmonic generation for characterizing nanoscale crystallization
- Techniques to assess amorphous-amorphous miscibility
- Probing hygroscopicity and reactivity in crystalline and amorphous salts
For most of her career, Taylor has studied various aspects of formulation and its production. In the future, she plans to learn more about how formulations interact with the body, specifically the gastrointestinal tract.
“Only a few studies have been conducted for supersaturating dosage forms,” says Taylor. “We have begun studies in this area by determining the crystallization behavior of drugs in ex-vivo intestinal fluids, extracted from healthy volunteers.”
Taylor hopes that, by understanding more about the interplay between biology and the dosage form, her work will contribute to improved formulation design, especially for difficult-to-deliver drugs, such as bifunctional small molecules.