Tablets & Capsules July 2018 23
and 3 had the fastest caffeine release, at less than 3 minutes.
Platforms 2 and 5 completed caffeine release shortly before
or after 5 minutes, respectively, while platform 4
completed caffeine release only after more than 10 minutes.
Stability and organoleptic perception
This study primarily focused on compactability and
disintegration time as key performance attributes.
Organoleptic perception is a highly subjective attribute
and also depends on several factors unrelated to the ODT
platform, such as the amount of API needed in the
formulation and the target population. On the other hand,
stability is an attribute that can clearly be measured.
Stability trials were run as part of this comparison but are
not covered in this article.
Conclusions
A successful DC ODT platform should simultaneously
address several key performance attributes such as poor
compactability, slow disintegration, lack of stability, and
inferior organoleptic properties. Each of the DC ODT
platforms in this study demonstrated advantages and
disadvantages, but platform 1 (the Omyapharm ODT
platform) combined good compactability with the fastest
disintegration time of the platforms studied, overcoming
several challenges to ODT formulation. T&C
References
1. Regulation (EC) No. 1901/2006 of the European
Parliament and of the Council, Official Journal of the
European Union, 2006, https://ec.europa.eu/health//sites/
h e a l t h / f i l e s / f i l e s / e u d r a l e x / v o l - 1 / r e g _ 2 0 0 6 _ 1 9 0 1 /
reg_2006_1901_en.pdf.
2. Persistence Market Research, "Global Market Study
on Orally Disintegrating Tablets", 2017, https://www.
aboutpharma.com/blog/2017/08/28/orally-disintegrating-
tablets-market-to-reach-us-27-bn-by-2025-persistence-
market-research/, (Accessed January 26, 2018).
3. P. A. Hannan, J. A. Khan, A. Khan, and S. Safiullah,
"Oral Dispersible System: A New Approach in Drug
Delivery System," Indian Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences,
Vol. 78, No. 1, 2016.
4. F. B. Abay and T. Ugurlu, "Orally Disintegrating
Tablets: A Short Review," Journal of Pharmaceutics & Drug
Development, Vol. 3, No. 3, 2015.
5. Michael Levin, Pharmaceutical Process Scale-Up, CRC
Press, 2001.
Carolina Diaz Quijano is head of technical services for
consumer goods at Omya International (+41 62 789 2274,
www.omya.com). She previously worked as a research
collaborator in protein engineering at the University of Zurich
and in diagnostics and genetic profiles at Stab Vida, Caparica,
Portugal. She holds a PhD in life sciences from ETH Zurich
and a licentiate degree in biotechnology and molecular biology
from the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina.
