Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research, Vol.54, No.24, 6305-6310, 2015
Dissolution Efficiency and Design Space for an Oral Pharmaceutical Product in Tablet Form
The primary drug quality requirements-safety, efficacy, and reliability-for oral pharmaceutical products in tablet form, translate into bioavailability, tablet weight, and tablet strength. The bioavailability of an oral drug, i.e., the amount of the drug that can reach the systemic circulation, is dependent on the drug permeation rate through the epithelial membrane or on dissolution rate, in the case of bioequivalence. Thus, the critical quality attributes affecting bioavailability can be the dissolution profile, tablet weight, and tablet hardness, which are affected by process conditions and drug product composition, i.e., active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) and excipients and their mass fractions. A Mixture Design experiment (DOE) has been carried out for a generic oral drug, with the input factors being the mass fractions of three excipients and the response variables being the dissolution profile, tablet weight, and hardness. While the last two response variables are single-point-value attributes, a dissolution profile is a multipoint-value attribute and is assessed using integral measures (e.g., similarity factor) from pairwise, model-independent methods. The data from the Mixture Design experiment are used to develop a multiregression and multiresponse optimization model, which, in turn, are used to determine the Design Space (DS) for the pharmaceutical product of interest.