Important research advances at SweDeliver in 2026

Lidia Habtemikael, PhD student in SweDeliver’s Oral Drug Delivery work package, presents in her article Tailored Pediatric Clonazepam Tablets Produced by 3D Printing: Meeting Quality Standards and Improving Permeation a study of how the composition of a drug-loaded emulsion gel affects the quality of 3D-printed tablets – with the aim of identifying a formulation that produces tablets with uniform properties and rapid disintegration.

Habtemikael’s results show that an optimised emulsion gel can be used to 3D-print high-quality, child-friendly and personalised clonazepam tablets that meet pharmacopoeial requirements and show greater permeation in an in vitro model than a marketed product. The article, co-authored by, among others, Professors Christel Bergström and Alexandra Teleki at the Department of Pharmacy, was published in Biomedicine & Pharmacotherapy, Vol. 200/2026.

Mingjun Wu, PhD student in SweDeliver’s Oral Drug Delivery work package, investigates in her study Exploration of Colonic Mucus as a Dissolution Compartment for Orally Administered Drugs whether colonic mucus can contribute to the dissolution of poorly water-soluble drugs. Wu shows that 14 of the 15 drugs investigated had their highest solubility in the colonic mucus solution – indicating that mucus may facilitate dissolution and thereby contribute to drug absorption, rather than acting solely as a barrier to drug uptake.

Co-authors of this article, published in The AAPS Journal, Vol. 28/2026, include Eva Karlsson of AstraZeneca and Christel Bergström, Director of SweDeliver and Professor of Molecular Pharmaceutics.

Ellen Brunzell, who recently completed her PhD at SweDeliver’s Parenteral Drug Delivery work package, has published the article Structural Determination of Self-Assembled Aggregates Formed by a Therapeutic Cyclical Peptide and an Ionic Surfactant in Aqueous Solution in the Journal of Colloid and Interface Science, Vol. 704/2026.

In this article, Brunzell and colleagues, including Magnus Bergström, investigate how the peptide lanreotide interacts with the surfactant SDS and the structures they form together in aqueous solution. Her results show that lanreotide does not integrate into SDS micelles, but instead binds to their surface, providing further insight into how therapeutic peptides can interact with surfactants.

text: Magnus Alsne, photo: Mikael Wallerstedt a o