Unraveling the behavior of oral drug products inside the human gastrointestinal tract using the aspiration technique: History, methodology and applications

Fluid sampling from the gastrointestinal (GI) tract has been applied as a valuable tool to gain more insight into the fluids present in the human GI tract and to explore the dynamic interplay of drug release, dissolution, precipitation and absorption after drug product administration to healthy subjects. In the last twenty years, collaborative initiatives have led to a plethora of clinical aspiration studies that aimed to unravel the luminal drug behavior of an orally administered drug product. The obtained drug concentration-time profiles from different segments in the GI tract were a valuable source of information to optimize and/or validate predictive in vitro and in silico tools, freque…