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Pharmaceutical technology evaluation has traditionally been organized around pharmacokinetic performance, with bioavailability occupying a privileged position as a marker of formulation success. This emphasis has been scientifically productive because it links dosage form design to systemic exposure and supports comparability across products. Yet bioavailability captures only one part of the pathway between a pharmaceutical technology and sustained therapeutic benefit. A product may deliver favorable exposure under controlled conditions while still failing when introduced into everyday patient use. The central problem is that bioavailability-centered evaluation often assumes idealized conditions of administration, storage, handling, and persistence. In practice, patients must swallow, inject, inhale, store, prepare, remember, tolerate, and continue medicines within complex personal and healthcare environments. Technologies that improve exposure may therefore generate limited value if they are difficult to use, fragile under real-world variability, or unable to support continuity of treatment over time. This creates a gap between technical success and therapeutic success. The objective of this article is to propose a systems-based evaluation model for pharmaceutical technologies. The model treats usability, robustness, and therapeutic continuity as co-equal dimensions that complement traditional pharmacokinetic endpoints. Usability captures the human–technology interface, robustness captures performance consistency under realistic variability, and therapeutic continuity captures sustained benefit across time and care settings. Together, these dimensions broaden the meaning of pharmaceutical performance. The proposed model defines each dimension, explains their interactions, and translates them into a practical evaluation framework. It argues that usability, robustness, and therapeutic continuity should not be treated as late-stage refinements after bioavailability has been optimized. Instead, they should be incorporated early in product design and carried through development, assessment, and post-translation evaluation. Two tables are used to contrast the dominant bioavailability-centered paradigm with a systems-based view and to present the operational structure of the proposed model. Adopting a systems-based evaluation paradigm can help pharmaceutical technologies become not only pharmacokinetically effective but also usable, resilient, and capable of sustaining therapeutic benefit in practice. Such a shift does not diminish the importance of bioavailability. It places bioavailability within a broader causal architecture of real-world performance. The result is a more complete foundation for pharmaceutical technology assessment and patient-centered product development.

Controlled release has traditionally been conceptualised as a pharmaceutical formulation strategy for modifying drug input into the body. Within this view, long-acting injections, implants, transdermal systems, microneedle platforms, depot formulations, and extended-release systems are primarily evaluated through release kinetics, bioavailability, dose reduction, and pharmacokinetic smoothing. This article proposes a broader systems theory interpretation: controlled release technologies should be understood as temporal therapeutic infrastructure. Rather than acting merely as dosage forms, long-acting pharmaceutical technologies organise therapeutic time by distributing drug exposure across days, weeks, or months; reducing dependence on repeated patient action; buffering behavioural variability; and maintaining pharmacological continuity across clinical and everyday contexts. The article develops an original theoretical framework that links controlled release design to infrastructure logic, systems thinking, patient behaviour alignment, and therapeutic continuity. It argues that long-acting technologies create a temporal architecture within which patients, clinicians, drug products, appointments, monitoring systems, and disease dynamics interact. This reframing shifts evaluation away from isolated product performance and toward system-level questions: how much temporal flexibility a technology provides, how it absorbs missed doses or delayed visits, how it prevents sub-therapeutic gaps or accumulation, and how it redistributes responsibility between patient behaviour and pharmaceutical design. The framework contributes a systems-oriented vocabulary for analysing controlled release technologies as infrastructures of continuity, adherence, and time-sensitive therapeutic governance.