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Manufacturing of Multi-drug Formulations with Customised Dose by Solvent Impregnation of Mesoporous Silica Tablets

  • Research Article
  • Theme: Printing and Additive Manufacturing
  • Published:
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Abstract

The manufacture of personalised medicines where specific combinations of active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) and their dose within a tablet would be adjusted to the needs of individual patients, would require new manufacturing approaches compared to the established practice. In the case of low-dose formulations, the required precision of API content might not be achievable by traditional unit operations such as solid powder blending. The aim of the present work was to explore an alternative approach, based on the concept of pre-formulated placebo tablets containing mesoporous silica particles capable of absorbing APIs in the form of solutions, which can be precisely dosed at arbitrarily low quantities. The precision of the liquid dosing system has been validated; it was shown that the mechanical properties of the tablets were satisfactory even after multiple impregnation-drying cycles and that pharmacopoeia specifications on content uniformity could be met. Using model APIs, the spatial distribution of the API within the tablet after impregnation was investigated and shown to depend on the number and order of the impregnation-drying cycles. It was found that when an API was loaded to the tablet in a single step, a different dissolution profile was obtained compared to the same quantity dosed in multiple smaller steps. Overall, the approach of loading multiple API to a pre-formulated tablet at defined quantities using drop-on-demand liquid dosing was found to be feasible from the dose uniformity point of view. Further research should focus on potential API interactions and storage stability of tablets manufactured in this way.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by Specific University Research (MSMT no. SVV-21/2018). We would like to thank Dr. Pavel Ulbrich for help with Transmission Electron Microscopy. Financial support from the Grant Agency of the Czech Republic (project GACR no. 16-12291S) is gratefully acknowledged. We would like to thank Zentiva, k.s., for kindly donating excipients for this work and providing access to a tablet press.

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Author notes

  1. Marek Šoltys and Sarah Akhlasová contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Chemistry and Technology, Technická 5, 166 28, Prague 6, Czech Republic

    Marek Šoltys, Sarah Akhlasová, Aleš Zadražil & František Štěpánek

  2. Zentiva, k.s, U Kabelovny 130, 102 00, Prague 10, Czech Republic

    Marek Šoltys & Pavel Kovačík

Authors
  1. Marek Šoltys
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  2. Sarah Akhlasová
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  4. Pavel Kovačík
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  5. František Štěpánek
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Correspondence to František Štěpánek.

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Šoltys, M., Akhlasová, S., Zadražil, A. et al. Manufacturing of Multi-drug Formulations with Customised Dose by Solvent Impregnation of Mesoporous Silica Tablets. AAPS PharmSciTech 20, 25 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1208/s12249-018-1224-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1208/s12249-018-1224-8

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