Pharmaceutical Technology Europe-03-07-2011

Compressed tablets are the most widely used solid dosage form so they must satisfy a number of physical requirements in terms of hardness, disintegration ability, friability and uniformity.

This issue will mark the last issue for me as Editor of PTE. It's time for me to move on to pastures new and to say my goodbyes.

One-pot processing is a term that includes any technology that combines different unit operations of a pharmaceutical production process into one machine.

With the future of healthcare revolving more and more around patient empowerment, data and healthy outcomes, the big question is can the traditionally slow and reserved pharma industry keep up with the new era?

The author presents a method to calculate the relationship between supply air volume flow and airborne particle concentrations.

Moisture Activated Dry Granulation (MADG) was developed in response to the difficulties experienced with wet granulation, in terms of endpoint, drying and milling. Wet granulation process endpoint is very sensitive to granulation time and shear. The wet granules need to be dried to a narrow range of moisture contents, which is difficult. The dried granules need to be milled, but the milled granules often have either too many fines or too many coarse particles (or both) - an undesirable bimodal distribution.

In France, public confidence in health authorities and pharmaceutical industry has been shaken by a safety scandal over the drug Mediator (benfluorex hydrochloride).

The unit selected for wet granulation, whether it be a high shear mixer or a fluidised bed, has a marked impact on granule properties.

Although tablet manufacture is traditionally a batchbased wet granulation process, there are many advantages to be gained by adopting dry granulation, including lower costs and increased yields.

Tooling standardisation in the tablet manufacturing industry is a topic that has concerned tabletting professionals for decades.

Many solid oral dosage forms do not dissolve at the correct place in the gastrointestinal tract for them to be absorbed into the bloodstream. Could magnets solve the problem?

Use of in-process particle size analysis has enabled pharmaceutical scientists and process engineers to track the progress of a granulation process and detect its endpoint.

There are two types of widely used dry granulation methods: slugging and roll compaction. Currently, roll compaction is preferred to slugging because it offers greater capacity and ease of process control.

In wet granulation, many companies used to rely on empirical data and quality control, but processes and technologies have improved in a variety of ways in recent years.