The effect of cream and ointment bases on the steady state penetration of permeants through intact skin: the reciprocal of the onset time of a pharmacodynamic effect as parameter of response

Abstract

To characterize cream or ointment bases for cosmetic or pharmaceutical purposes with regard to their effect on permeant penetration through intact healthy skin, the measurement of the pharmacodynamic response of a suitable model drug incorporated in these bases has been shown to be a promising approach. In general, it may be distinguished between thermodynamic vehicle effects owing to different permeant escaping tendencies from the vehicles and penetration-enhancing vehicle effects resulting from a change of the stratum corneum structure, which manifests itself in an increase of the permeant diffusion coefficient and/or its solubility in this barrier. As the latency time of onset of a pharmacodynamic effect, usually used as reciprocal value, represents a suitable response parameter under certain circumstances, this study was done to further evaluate this parameter with regard to the determination of relative bioavailability and penetration enhancement data obtained from simulated dose- and activity-response curves assuming infinite dose conditions, i.e. zero order penetration kinetics and considering varying lag times of drug penetration. The results indicate that bioavailability and enhancement factors may be determined accurately from the horizontal distance between dose- or activity-response curves of a standard and a test preparation as long as the curves are parallel to each other, as it is the case with uniform lag times of permeant penetration. Non-parallel curves observed with varying lag times indicate an influence of the vehicles on the permeant diffusion coefficient in the barrier. Enhancement factors from these curves may be obtained after determination of the lag times from the plateau region of the curves, subsequent subtraction of these values from the measured latency time data, and finally plotting of the reciprocal data as a function of the drug activity. Enhancement factors then correspond to the inverse logarithm of the horizontal distances between the resulting parallel curves.