The development of solid dosage forms and manufacturing processes are governed by complex physical properties of the powder and the type of pharmaceutical unit operation the manufacturing processes employs. Suitable powder flow properties and compactability are crucial bulk level properties for tablet manufacturing by direct compression. It is also generally agreed that small scale powder flow measurements can be useful to predict large scale production failure.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCo-processing an active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) with a low Tg excipient has been previously reported to be an effective strategy for preventing drug amorphisation on milling. This technique relies on the ability of the excipient to form a molecular dispersion with the amorphous API during the milling process. The presence of the excipient within the amorphous phase induces a reduction of the Tg.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe overall pharmaceutical market is changing. A more personalised medicine approach is replacing the concept of blockbuster drugs and the "one size fits all" model. The two main forces that fuel the growth of nano-enabled drug technologies are the low aqueous solubility of new chemical entities and the pharmaceutical market itself, as the development of novel drug delivery systems can extend the drug patent lifetime.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPharmaceutical applications which require knowledge of the solubility of a crystalline compound in an amorphous matrix are abundant in the literature. Several methods that allow the determination of such data have been reported, but so far have only been applicable to amorphous polymers above the glass transition of the resulting composites. The current work presents, for the first time, a reliable method for the determination of the solubility of crystalline pharmaceutical compounds in high and low molecular weight amorphous matrices at the glass transition and at room temperature (i.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe unintentional generation of amorphous character in crystalline active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) is an adverse consequence of mechanical activation during dosage form manufacture. In this study, we assess and compare the ability of low glass transition temperature (Tg) dicarboxylic acids to mitigate amorphisation of a model API, salbutamol sulphate (SS), on both co-milling and co-mixing. SS processed alone, as well as co-milled and co-mixed composites of the API with glutaric acid (GA), adipic acid (AA) and pimelic acid (PA) were characterised by powder X-ray diffraction (pXRD), differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) and dynamic vapour sorption (DVS).
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