Various Polymer Use In Pharmaceutical Application And Polymer Coating

Tablets are by far the most popular dosage form when administering drugs to patients, and a large proportion of the tablets produced around the world are film coated. With the current awareness of health, safety and environmental problems, film coating is a process that is routinely employed in the preparation of pharmaceutical solid dosage forms.The success of coating process is determined by three factors: formulation of the coating system, coating process parameters and tablet core. During the last 20 years, there has been significant research into coating formulations and processes.It has been used extensively in the pharmaceutical industry, e.g. for the application of non-functional or functional coats (aesthetic, protective or rate controlling polymer films) and for the deposition of Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (APIs) onto nonpareils (multi-particulate dosage forms).An accurate method of coating objects 3 to 30 mm in length with APIs is also desired in the pharmaceutical industry as this is the size range of most single-unit solid dosage forms. These include tablets for oral administration and forms for other methods of delivery including human implantation.Existing methods of coating objects in this size range have limitations, e.g. in terms of coating speed and accuracy / uniformity, particularly for the deposition of low dose API onto single unit tablet dosage forms which requires a greater degree of accuracy than can be achieved using current tablet coating techniques1.A novel method of coating small objects has been developed that has demonstrated the ability to uniformly coat inert objects of sizes between 3 and 30 mm in length with a high degree of accuracy. Using the coating method, Relative Standard Deviations (RSDs) below 2% have been achieved for total coating contents as low as 200 micrograms per object. However, it is unknown how accurately the deposition will be on conventional pharmaceutical tablets (which have a higher degree of friability and more irregular surface compared to the inert objects used).