To start off with, I will admit something that I almost never here seasoned scientists say: “I was a beginner once, too.” But I will go even farther than that; I will say that: “I once didn’t know what I was doing.” Why? Because formulation science is confusing!
Any time we are combining ingredients in a new way, they can behave in surprising ways. That’s in addition to all the standard physical and chemical properties that we usually think about when combining ingredients, such as: density, viscosity, osmolarity, conductivity, pH, temperature changes, etc. At first it truly does seem overwhelming, and it seems like you never will know what you are doing. The bad news is that you never really develop a sixth sense about all these things; you just get used to them. The good news is that as you develop formulation experience, you will become an expert at determining what properties matter in a given situation, how to design the correct experiments to manage and understand these properties, and ultimately how to control them for useful applications. Hang in there and you will not be a beginner for long!
Looking back to the time that I was a beginner, I found the biggest challenge to be identifying what truly mattered in a given system. For example, if every time I need to make a standard saline prep I measure density, visocity, osmolarity, conductivity, pH, and temperature change during addition, getting anything else done in the lab will be impossible. So what actually matters? If we don’t know, how do we find out?
An approach I’ve seen by multiple beginning scientists is to use Google, but this has it’s pros and cons. The obvious pro is that Google presents tremendous information, but the con is whether that information is truly helpful. Yes there is tremendous information available, but how much of it is even pertinent to what you are doing?
Another approach I’ve seen is to chat about it with your peers. Again, certainly you should tap the knowledge of your peers from time to time, but it may be hard for them to really be helpful. Once again, this is the case of tremendous information available, but how much of it is even pertinent to what you are doing?
A winning strategy that was hammered into me in graduate school by my mentor and that I find to be still useful in my career today is this: “Start at the End.” What I mean to say is to start by listing the desired properties that your end formulation must have and then work backwards from there. An absolutely excellent talk about this topic can be found in the link below by Michael Margolis, a Google Venture employee. I have listened to quite a bit of this talk while writing, and I just can’t emphasize enough the importance of what he is saying.
https://library.gv.com/start-at-the-end-how-to-do-research-that-has-real-impact-f2ef95c8685e
To put this in the context of our saline example, what is the final application of this saline prep? Let’s say that it is for a drug product, where a drug would be dissolved in this saline solution prior to injection into a patient. The most obvious feature of this saline prep is that it must dissolve this drug, as well as be compatible with the requirements of injectable products for human patients. Now these are actual formulation requirements that will be much easier to research, develop, and implement.
Let’s take a moment and look at the before and after of “starting at the end.” At first we started with: “How do I prep a saline formulation?” This is a broad, non-specific question to which they will be as many answers as there are stars in the sky. Starting at the end, however, lead to us to two, highly specific questions to which there are a narrower set of answers: 1) “What aspects of this saline prep are important for solubilizing our drug?” and 2) “What are the requirements of saline formulated for injection into human patients?” One can start to imagine specific journal articles, experiments, and plans for how to answer these questions whereas the first question was so broad it was difficult to tell where to start.
So what is my advice to beginning formulation scientists? START AT THE END. Stay tuned for further discussion of this topic in future posts.