Challenging Skin Penetration Assumptions with GSK and the University of Reading

New research is redefining assumptions about the skin penetration potential of large molecular weight drugs, offering hope for new therapies in difficult-to-treat dermatological diseases.

It has long been believed that molecules above 1,000 Daltons cannot penetrate the skin at therapeutic levels, limiting their use in topical drug delivery. However, researchers from GSK and the University of Reading collaborated with MedPharm to challenge this paradigm.

For this study, MedPharm developed targeted disease activity skin models to test the ability of a 22k Dalton aptamer—a specialized RNA molecule under increasing pharmaceutical interest—to penetrate the skin and demonstrate therapeutic efficacy.

The results revealed that the aptamer not only penetrated the skin barrier but also showed measurable therapeutic activity. These groundbreaking findings were published in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology and suggest that the traditional molecular weight limitations for topical drug delivery may be more flexible than previously thought.