How oral drugs absorption by stomach is affected by body posture

Researchers from Johns Hopkins University and Johns Hopkins School of Medicine employed a biomimetic in-silico simulator based on the realistic anatomy and morphology of the stomach-a "StomachSim"-to investigate and quantify the effect of the body posture and stomach motility on drug bioavailability.

Stomach contents, motility, and gastric fluid dynamics all play a role in a drug's bioavailability, and stomach contractions can induce pressure and generate complex pill trajectories. This results in varying rates of pill dissolution and nonuniform emptying of the drug into the duodenum and, sometimes, gastric dumping in the case of modified-release dosage.

Together, these issues pose several challenges for the design of drug delivery.

"In this work, we demonstrate a novel computer simulation platform that offers the potential for overcoming these limitations," said co-author Rajat Mittal. "Our models can generate biorelevant data on drug dissolution that can provide useful and unique insights into the complex physiological processes behind the oral administration of pills."

Ref:

J.H. Lee, S. Kuhar, J.-H. Seo, P. J. Pasricha, and R. Mittal, "Computational modeling of drug dissolution in the human stomach: Effects of posture and gastroparesis on drug bioavailability"the the   , Physics of Fluids, Aug. 9, 2022 (DOI: 10.1063/5.0096877)