[New intravenous anesthetics. Remifentanil, S(+)-ketamine, eltanolone and target controlled infusion]

The need for better anaesthetic agents has led to the approval or the clinical studies of new compounds, which have or are assumed to have a higher degree of controllability or an improved spectrum of undesired side effects compared to other approved anaesthetics. For the i.v.-anaesthetics, different approaches have been used to achieve this. Among these are the new synthesis of a new chemical entity (NCE), the isolation of an isomer of a racemic mixture and the new galenic preparation of a known substance for i.v.-application. This review gives for all three approaches an example. Remifentanil is a NCE which has been released in Germany a few months ago. This compound has reached the highest degree of intraoperative controllability among all i.v. anaesthetics. Its context-sensitive half-life, that is the effective time for drug concentration to decline by 50% (ET50), is about 3-4 min even after several hours of continuous administration. One reason for this exceptional property is that its metabolism is independent of liver and kidney function and depends almost only on blood and tissue nonspecific esterases. S(+)-ketamine represents an example for the isolation of a specific isomer out of a known racemic mixture. Racemic ketamine was introduced into clinical practice in 1965. The clinical trials with the isolated S(+)-ketamine, which are finished now, showed that the racemic mixture of both isomer does not lead to an additive effect, but the action of S(+)-ketamine is weakened by the R(-)-compound. In volunteers studies it was not possible to achieve a complete loss of consciousness by administration of R(-)-ketamine only, whereby with S(+)-ketamine one could reduce the dose with respect to the racemic mixture by a factor of two to achieve complete consciousness. This dose reduction is accompanied by a faster offset time. For broader clinical applications one would therefore expect a higher degree of controllability and a shortened recovery period. With eltanolon a substance is presented which is known as the metabolite pregnanolon of the reductive metabolic pathway of progesterone since the 50s and which is known to possess strong hypnotic potency. However, because of its low water solubility it could not be studied as an i.v. agent until in 1990 one succeeded in making a water soluble emulsion in fat. The clearance of eltanolon is ca. 25 ml/kg/min and it has a terminal half-life of about 3 hr. It has, however, a pronounced hysteresis of 8 min between blood and effect site. This unfavourable pharmacokinetic property in conjunction with observed unvoluntary spontaneous movements and increased muscle tone during application has led to the cessation of its further clinical development. With the introduction of shorter acting compounds it is also necessary to improve the traditional techniques of i.v. drug delivery like manual bolus injections or drip infusions. After more than 16 years of research and development in the field of Target-Controlled Infusions (TCI), there has been recently introduced the so called Diprifusor-TCI, as a commercially available software module to control the delivery of propofol. TCI uses established pharmacokinetic data to determine infusion rates to achieve desired drug concentrations serving as the target, which can be chosen interactively. This way of dosing i.v. anesthetics is obviously not restricted to one specific compound but can be applied to any i.v.-drug if appropriate pharmacokinetic data are used.