Pharmaceutical Developability of Clinically Relevant Flavonoids like Curcumin: Why are We Failing?

Abstract

Flavonoids are promising therapeutic class of polyphenolic biomolecules with the potential to alleviate many severe disease states with multi-factorial pathogenesis because of their inherent ability to regulate key biological cascades at the molecular, cellular and organism levels. However, these important polyphenolic compounds frequently pose drug delivery challenges to scientists and produce inefficient pharmacokineticpharmacodynamic activities. Importantly, despite their therapeutic potential and the focus of the scientists being on the formulation development front in the recent years, developing an ideal drug delivery system for some of the most important polyphenolic biomolecules such as curcumin is still a challenge. Hence, the basic intent of writing this article is to bring back the focus of the formulation scientists on one of the key physicochemical properties of these important biomolecules i.e., the importance of pH-stability profile of flavonoids, which could play vital role in the formulation developability aspects of important biomolecules such as curcumin by the selection of an ideal dosage form.