FLOATING MICROSPHERES: A PROMISING APPROACH FOR GASTRIC RETENTION

Gastric emptying is a very complex and uncertain process which sometime alters the in vivo performance of the drug delivery systems. In order to avoid this variability, efforts have been made to increase the retention time of the drug-delivery systems for more than 12 hours. The floating or hydrodynamically controlled drug delivery systems are useful in such application. The main purpose of writing this review on floating drug delivery systems (FDDS) is to correlate and compile the recent literature on the principal mechanism and working of floatation to achieve gastric retention. There are various recent developments and findings of FDDS including the physiological and formulation variables affecting gastric retention. Also there are various approaches to design single-unit and multiple-unit floating systems with their classification and formulation aspects. This review also summarizes the in vitro techniques, in vivo studies to evaluate the performance and application of floating systems, and applications of these systems. Floating drug delivery system, are useful for various problems encountered during the development of a pharmaceutical dosage form.