Pediatric Mini-Tablets: Predicting the Hidden Risk of Fill Errors.

Compressed mini-tablets in sachets or capsules are an increasingly prevalent oral solid dosage form for pediatric products. While resembling adult tablets, additional care is required to control weight and potency (blend uniformity) variation due to their small size (≤2.5 mm average diameter).

Continuous Twin-Screw wet granulation process with In-Barrel drying and NIR setup for Real-Time Moisture Monitoring.

The purpose of this study was to evaluate if wet granule formation and drying could take place in a single operation by utilizing in-barrel drying. The drying kinetics of the formulation were studied in order to select appropriate processing parameters and assess feasibility with short residence times in the extruder. The 18-mm extruder was operated in a 40:1 L:D ratio with 8 zones.

Development of a Controlled Continuous Low-Dose Feeding Process.

This paper proposes a feed rate control strategy for a novel volumetric micro-feeder, which can accomplish low-dose feeding of pharmaceutical raw materials with significantly different powder properties. The developed feed-forward control strategy enables a constant feed rate with a minimum deviation from the set-point, even for materials that are typically difficult to accurately feed (e.g.

Insights into the Control of Drug Release from Complex Immediate Release Formulations.

The kinetics of water transport into tablets, and how it can be controlled by the formulation as well as the tablet microstructure, are of central importance in order to design and control the dissolution and drug release process, especially for immediate release tablets. This research employed terahertz pulsed imaging to measure the process of water penetrating through tablets using a flow cell. Tablets were prepared over a range of porosity between 10% to 20%.

Solubilizing temperature of crystalline drug in polymer carrier: A rheological investigation on a posaconazole-copovidone system with low drug load.

Measuring the solubility of a crystalline active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) in a polymer-rich system is challenging due to the high viscosity of the polymer which kinetically impedes reaching the solubility equilibrium. In this study, a rheological approach of determining the solubilizing temperature of a crystalline API in a polymeric carrier has been developed. To validate the method, a model physical mixture of crystalline posaconazole and copovidone with a relatively low API load (25 wt%) was utilized.