A review of emerging technologies enabling improved solid oral dosage form manufacturing and processing

Muhammad Sohail Arshad, Saman Zafar, Bushra Yousef, Yasmine Alyassin, Radeyah Ali, Ali AlAsiri, Ming-Wei Chang, Zeeshan Ahmad, Amal Ali Elkordy, Ahmed Faheem, Kendal Pitt*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalReview articlepeer-review

Abstract

Tablets are the most widely utilized solid oral dosage forms because of the advantages of self-administration, stability, ease of handling, transportation, and good patient compliance. Over time, extensive advances have been made in tableting technology. This review aims to provide an insight about the advances in tablet excipients, manufacturing, analytical techniques and deployment of Quality by Design (QbD). Various excipients offering novel functionalities such as solubility enhancement, super-disintegration, taste masking and drug release modifications have been developed. Furthermore, co-processed multifunctional ready-to-use excipients, particularly for tablet dosage forms, have benefitted manufacturing with shorter processing times. Advances in granulation methods, including moist, thermal adhesion, steam, melt, freeze, foam, reverse wet and pneumatic dry granulation, have been proposed to improve product and process performance. Furthermore, methods for particle engineering including hot melt extrusion, extrusion-spheronization, injection molding, spray drying / congealing, co-precipitation and nanotechnology-based approaches have been employed to produce robust tablet formulations. A wide range of tableting technologies including rapidly disintegrating, matrix, tablet-in-tablet, tablet-in-capsule, multilayer tablets and multiparticulate systems have been developed to achieve customized formulation performance. In addition to conventional invasive characterization methods, novel techniques based on laser, tomography, fluorescence, spectroscopy and acoustic approaches have been developed to assess the physical–mechanical attributes of tablet formulations in a non- or minimally invasive manner. Conventional UV–Visible spectroscopy method has been improved (e.g. fiber-optic probes and UV imaging-based approaches) to efficiently record the dissolution profile of tablet formulations. Numerous modifications in tableting presses have also been made to aid machine product changeover, cleaning, and enhance efficiency and productivity. Various process analytical technologies have been employed to track the formulation properties and critical process parameters. These advances will contribute to a strategy for robust tablet dosage forms with excellent performance attributes.

Original languageEnglish
Article number113840
Number of pages28
JournalAdvanced Drug Delivery Reviews
Volume178
Early online date18 Jun 2021
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Nov 2021

Keywords

  • Capsule, analytical methodology
  • Continuous manufacturing
  • Granulation
  • Hot melt extrusion
  • Multilayer tablets
  • Nanotechnology
  • Oral solid dose
  • Quality by design, excipients
  • Tablet

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'A review of emerging technologies enabling improved solid oral dosage form manufacturing and processing'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this