Inimitable Imipenem

I would like to begin this post by apologizing for the tongue twisting title. And that will be the last of the alliterations.
Imipenem is an antibiotic, a mighty one for that matter. For chemistry peeps, it belongs to the carbapenem family, not distant from good ol' penicillin.
So why would I write about this? It isn't the drug I am concerned about, it is about an "Industry Defined Problem" regarding imipenem that a friend and I broke our heads over for about 5 days. Every living moment was enveloped with the question of "How would you solubilize imipenem for a subcutaneous pump device?"
On the surface that seems a rather inane question but there are of course a hundred considerations to be made. It works well when your team mate and you do not see eye to eye -  it opens various questions, debates and a lot of reasoning before coming to a conclusion. Imipenem is rather a difficult drug to deal with, looking at its physicochemical properties and its dose. And in pharmaceutical problems, solubilizing the drug is not the only task. Pharmacists have to ensure the strategy is patentable as well as can be made affordable to the masses.
So after a lot of brainstorming, we came to the conclusion that we presented a straightforward solution that according to us encompassed all obstacles at hand. We did a decent job I'd say, we did bag the second prize for it.
The takeaway from this whole exercise (apart from a certificate and pocket money) was (a) I learnt that solutions to problems needn't always be complex. While we spent ages looking at the latest, most advanced techniques at solubilization, we left out some inherent properties of imipenem that would have led us to the answer sooner. "Are you looking closely?" (b) scientific papers are not always right. Yes, this is a common misconception that if it is published, it is true. We did come across some bogus papers that changed the way I perceived scientific studies.

The 5 nerve-wracking days in 2014 were highly memorable. Because I have never felt this level of frustration, desperation and despair all together. No, even break-ups didn't match to this. I still recall the frantic call I made, "LOOK, LOOK! CYCLODEXTRINS ARE WRONG!" That one phone call was all we needed, it not only proved our method right, but also proved 5 other teams wrong xD

Those were rather great times, yes. Looking forward to ever more.