In vitro tools for orally inhaled drug products—state of the art for their application in pharmaceutical research and industry and regulatory challenges

The drug development process is a lengthy and expensive challenge for all involved players. Experience with the COVID-19 pandemic underlines the need for a rapid and effective approval for treatment options. As essential prerequisites for successful drug approval, a combination of high-quality studies and reliable research must be included. To this day, mainly in vivo data are requested and collected for assessing safety and efficacy and are therefore decisive for the pre-clinical evaluation of the respective drug. This review aims to summarize the current state of the art for safety and efficacy studies in pharmaceutical research and industry to address the relevant regulatory challenges and to provide an outlook on implementing more in vitro methods as alternative to animal testing. While the public demand for alternative methods is becoming louder, first examples have meanwhile found acceptance in relevant guidelines, e.g. the OECD guidelines for skin sensitizer. Besides ethically driven developments, also the rather low throughput and relatively high costs of animal experiments are forcing the industry towards the implementation of alternative methods. In this context, the development of orally inhaled drug products is particularly challenging due to the complexity of the lung as biological barrier and route of administration. The replacement of animal experiments with focus on the lungs requires special designed tools to achieve predictive data. New in vitro test systems of increasing complexity are presented in this review. Limits and advantages are discussed to provide some perspective for a future in vitro testing strategy for orally inhaled drug products. GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT: [Image: see text]