Many solid-dose oral drug products are engineered to release their active ingredients into the body at a certain rate. Techniques for measuring the dissolution or degradation of a drug product in vitro play a crucial role in predicting how a drug product will perform in vivo. However, existing techniques are often labor-intensive, time-consuming, irreproducible, require specialized analytical equipment, and provide only “snapshots” of drug dissolution every few minutes. These limitations make it difficult for pharmaceutical companies to obtain full dissolution profiles for drug products in a variety of different conditions, as recommended by the US Food and Drug Administration. Additionally, for drug dosage forms containing multiple controlled-release pellets, particles, beads, granules, etc. in a single capsule or tablet, measurements of the dissolution of the entire multi-particle capsule or tablet are incapable of detecting pellet-to-pellet variations in controlled release behavior. In this work, we demonstrate a simple and fully-automated technique for obtaining dissolution profiles from single controlled-release pellets. We accomplished this by inverting the drug dissolution problem: instead of measuring the increase in the concentration of drug compounds in the solution during dissolution (as is commonly done), we monitor the decrease in the buoyant mass of the solid controlled-release pelletmore »
This content will become publicly available on February 9, 2023
- Award ID(s):
- 1809318
- Publication Date:
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10355765
- Journal Name:
- Soft Matter
- Volume:
- 18
- Issue:
- 6
- Page Range or eLocation-ID:
- 1174 to 1182
- ISSN:
- 1744-683X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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