Re: Do you know any scientists who have tested my expeiment before?

Hi Kaitlyn,

You're proposing a really cool study.  These kinds of studies go on all 
the time, so it's difficult for me to point you in the direction of any 
particular study.  Part of the difficulty is that drug solubility (the 
property governing how well a chemical dissolves in some substance) in the 
stomach is very dependent upon what drug you are looking at.  Different 
drugs dissolve in the stomach to different degrees, for example, aspirin 
dissolves much more readily than does penicillin.

Drug companies are doing these kinds of studies all the time when they 
design a new drug, because they need to know where it will be absorbed 
into the body, and how much of it will be absorbed.

If you are looking to do an experiment on this, I would suggest using an 
acid such as hydrochloric acid (that is the primary acid in the stomach), 
under the VERY DIRECT supervision of your teacher, and attempt to dissolve 
something like aspirin.

In drug companies, they typically use special labeling techniques so that 
they can track where the drug goes.  They use radioactive labels, most 
typically, and then take blood samples at regular intervals (every hour) 
to assess how much of the drug is in the blood.

One example of where solubility findings are reported is  http://www.fda
.gov/cder/foi/label/2001/20884s1lbl.pdf but I'm not sure of 
how much use that will be to you.  The FDA website has many similar 
reports on various drugs.  Another source is www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed --
 go there and enter in your drug of choice, and then "stomach solubility".

Good luck!

Lyle D. Burgoon
Predoctoral Fellow,
Bioinformatician, DBA
Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology
Michigan State University