ERCO Pharma accesses VEGA supercomputer through the EuroHPC JU Regular Call with the help of ENCCS. It's the second time ERCO pharma gains access to a EuroHPC JU supercomputer and makes it the first SME to be accepted through the EuroHPC JU Regular Call which gives the ability to use an even larger amount of CPU and GPU cores.

Transdermal and topical drug delivery allows for non-invasive, pain-free, continuous drug administration with reduced side effects and increased patient compliance compared to per oral or intravenous drug delivery.

With this access, ERCO Pharma is now able to use 3 900 000 GPU cores enabling them to explore a new way of developing transdermal, or topical, pharmaceutical formulations. The developed model of the skin barrier structure is combining cryo-EM images of skin samples, molecular dynamics (MD) simulations and EM image simulations from the equilibrated MD output systems. (Lundborg et al., 2018)

Using this atomistic model for skin permeability calculations is patented by ERCO Pharma AB. The MD skin permeability simulations provide increased knowledge about where, in the skin barrier, a permeant is passing the slowest. It also shows where, in the skin barrier, permeability enhancers are most likely to remain and be effective. This facilitates selecting combinations of permeation enhancers in a way that is not possible based on experimental data from single permeation enhancers, see Fig. 1.

ERCO Pharma envisions being able to improve existing transdermal formulations as well as improving the development process of novel delivery vehicles.

If you want to learn more about what ERCO Pharma works with, you can watch the video below from ENCCS Industry Days 2022.