EASY, FHNW School of Life Sciences

Aqueous solubility is essential for drug absorption and bioavailability, but current assays face trade-offs between accuracy, sensitivity, speed, and resource use. EASY simplifies solubility measurement with high sensitivity, minimum use of resources and impactful savings. In the project, we developed an industrial-level prototype with optimized performance suited for device validation with early adopters. We explored value-added applications of EASY in drug R&D.

Working with Oryl Photonics and CSEM, we developed a novel solubility assessment method using non-resonant second harmonic scattering (SHS), which detects water molecule fluctuations around solutes. The apparent solubility of 14 poorly soluble drugs measured by SHS strongly correlated with traditional HPLC data (r = 0.9273). The study also evaluated each compound’s supersaturation propensity and linked this behavior to their thermal properties, with ketoconazole and tamoxifen showing the highest supersaturation. The SHS method effectively identified micelle formation, both in a reference surfactant and in several drugs, indicating self-assembly above the solubility limit. Overall, SHS is shown to be a promising, high-throughput, and resource-efficient technique for solubility and aggregation studies at the molecular level.