Editorial: Ionic Liquid Technology: A Potential New Platform for the Pharmaceutical Industry

The pharmaceutical industry is undoubtedly facing a series of challenges. Although many of these challenges are related to the nature of this industry and current business models, there is also an urgent need for new science to bring forward innovative and effective drugs and therapies. The classic strategies currently being followed are reaching a saturation point in which it is getting harder to come up with effective, acceptable new chemical entities. Less than a tenth of the drugs in clinical trials make it to the market, causing the companies to incur huge losses, and reducing the availability of efficient pharmaceuticals in the market for the people who need them. In a scenario in which the number of new drugs annually approved continues to decay, the novel active compounds now proposed tend to have more and more problems in matching all the desired requirements of solubility, bioavailability, stability, etc.