Review of real-time release testing of pharmaceutical tablets: State-of-the art, challenges and future perspective.

In the last decade significant advances have been made in process analytical technologies and digital manufacturing of pharmaceutical oral solid dosage forms leading to enhanced product knowledge and process understanding. These developments provide an excellent platform for realising real-time release testing (RTRT) to eliminate all, or certain, off-line end product tests assuring that the drug product is of intended quality. This review article presents the state of the art, an RTRT development workflow as well as challenges and opportunities of RTRT in batch and continuous manufacturing of pharmaceutical tablets.

Characterizing drug product continuous manufacturing residence time distributions of major/minor excipient step changes using near infrared spectroscopy and process parameters.

The material residence time distribution in a continuous manufacturing process can be utilized to develop, design and justify the process control strategy. This paper successfully demonstrates using both major and minor formulation component step changes to determine the system response using either Near Infrared Spectroscopy or process parameters. These options provide development flexibility to determine the system's material residence time earlier in the development process and more cost effectively.

Tablet Compression Force as a Process Analytical Technology (PAT): 100% Inspection and Control of Tablet Weight Uniformity.

The modern rotary pharmaceutical tablet press is capable of accepting or rejecting individual tablets based on the measured compression force of the tablet. Because during steady operation, each tablet is compressed to the same thickness, a larger compression force implies a heavier tablet. Tablets that are too heavy likely contain more than the desired content of drug substance.

On-line monitoring of blend uniformity in continuous drug product manufacturing process--The impact of powder flow rate and the choice of spectrometer: Dispersive vs. FT.

One of the commonly acknowledged issues in continuous manufacturing of drug products is how to provide a representative sampling on flowing powder to assure its blend uniformity. An investigation was conducted to improve understanding on the impact of powder flow rate under different continuous manufacturing conditions and the impact of optical parameters (such as resolution, co-adds, and integration time) on NIR spectral quality with respect to a dispersive and a Fourier transform instrument. A partial least squares (PLS)-based spectral pretreatment was found useful to tackle the impact of different flow rates on NIR spectral signals.