What is it about?

We show a method that can measure very quickly how a liquid moves through a solid which is made by compacting lots of powder particles. The example system we choose is that of a pharmaceutical tablet as it is exposed to water in a process called disintegration, which is the first step in releasing the drug molecules from a tablet when a patient takes their medication.

Featured Image

Why is it important?

The results are very interesting as it was previously not possible to measure such fast liquid transport processes in pharmaceutical tablets and therefore the relative ratio of the different powder components that are chosen to make up a tablet were usually chosen by trial and error. In the majority of tablets the aim is for the drug particles to become dissolved as quickly as possible by the liquid in the body and our work makes it possible for the first time to properly measure which combination of other materials, the so called excipients, works best to achieve this aim.

Perspectives

The method paves the way for the development of mathematical models to describe these disintegration processes which in turn would allow for the rational design of tablet formulations in the future that will yield the best tablet performance. The other significance of this work is that the method is a universal one which can be applied for any other porous medium in the future provided the material is transparent to terahertz radiation, as is the case for most polymers, ceramics and semiconductors.

Dr Axel Zeitler
University of Cambridge

Read the Original

This page is a summary of: The Disintegration Process in Microcrystalline Cellulose Based Tablets, Part 1: Influence of Temperature, Porosity and Superdisintegrants, Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences, October 2015, Elsevier,
DOI: 10.1002/jps.24544.
You can read the full text:

Read

Resources

Contributors

The following have contributed to this page