Development of machine learning predictive models for estimating pharmaceutical solubility in supercritical CO₂: case...

Production of nano-sized solid-dosage drugs is useful for pharmaceutical industry owing to high solubility and efficacy of the drugs for patients, which can also reduce the drugs side effects. For the solid-dosage oral formulations, the nanomedicine can be prepared via either top-down or bottom-up approach to enhance the drug solubility which in turns enhances the drug bioavailability. A novel methodology for simulation and prediction of medicine solubility in supercritical solvent was developed based on supervised learning algorithms for classification of the data. The data for the simulations were collected on solubility of a model drug in supercritical carbon dioxide. The supercritical-based processing is usually used for preparation of nanomedicine with enhanced bioavailability, and the developed simulation method can help design and optimize the process for industrial applications. The data was obtained with temperature and pressure as the input parameters, whereas the drug solubility is considered as sole estimated output in the model. The validation outputs indicated that great agreement was obtained between the measured data and the simulated values with acceptable regression coefficient for the whole simulations. The simulation results revealed that the supervised learning algorithm is robust and rigorous for prediction of drug solubility data in supercritical conditions and can be used for process optimization and understanding the effects of process parameters. This study is innovative as it methodically assesses diverse machine learning methodologies, encompassing polynomial regression at different complexity tiers and the Gaussian Process Regressor for predicting pharmaceutical solubility. This comparative framework illustrates the bias-variance tradeoff and offers pragmatic guidance for choosing suitable models according to dataset attributes. The methodology presents a time-efficient and cost-effective alternative to conventional thermodynamic modelling for supercritical pharmaceutical processing.