The counter ion: expanding excipient functionality

Excipients have increasingly become ‘enablers’ of drug delivery and efficacy rather than passive bystanders. Advances in pharmaceutical technology have enabled the ability to deliver specific counter ions (in the form of the counter ion containing excipient) and the API simultaneously to preselected targets in the body. This, coupled with a near universal mechanism of columbic interactions that determine the [API- counter ion] efficacy, can be harnessed to exploit this hitherto unavailable or unrecognized enabling mechanism. New excipients may be assembled by a near inexhaustible supply of different permutations of counter ions and their judicious use in specific situations could potentially drive a renaissance in excipient innovation (and drug delivery and efficacy) despite regulatory stagnation.