Der Anaesthesist
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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. ⋯ 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.