Merlin can use the same techniques developed to speed up human tablet development and apply the knowledge to veterinary products, such as compactibility and tabletability studies, to help understand any causes of poor performance that might be seen in this formulation.
Compression and Formulation Science to Predict Manufacturing Scalability in Animal Health
The Challenge
Medicines for animals can be manufactured in a similar way to human pharmaceuticals. Sometimes, the different requirements of the animal mean that a special formulation using the correct ingredients is required to deliver the medicine where it is needed. This will take into consideration the specific physiology of the animal and sometimes psychology.
Merlin can use the same techniques developed to speed up human tablet development and apply the knowledge to veterinary products, such as compactibility and tabletability studies, to help understand any causes of poor performance that might be seen in this formulation.
The Merlin team has been delighted to be involved in a project for a pharmaceutical company that specialises in animal health. The project is in the early stages of the formulation for a new medicine for cats.
The drug was a preventative medication designed to be delivered orally to healthy cats. The delivery method and the tastes of cats are different from humans and a cat-friendly formulation for a chewable immediate release tablet was required.
Our Case Study Highlights:
- The same techniques can be used for both human tablets and veterinary products.
- Compactibility and tabletability studies are used to help understand any causes of poor performance from the formulation.
- A small number of prototype formulations were used to determine the most suitable formulation.
- Some mixtures showed poor compression properties across the whole range.
- Other formulations had the strength to withstand packing and distribution.
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The Solution
At the initial stage, our customer provided a small number of prototype formulations that used different levels of materials so that we could test to find the most suitable formulation for their medicine. We compressed the immediate release blends using simulated press profiles to show how the formulations would perform during high speed tableting.
Some of the mixtures had very poor compression properties across the whole of its compressibility range, this could have been due to capping and lamination or reduction in crushing strength and would not have scaled up well, which would have caused numerous issues during manufacture. However, there were formulations which looked more promising as these formulations had the strength to withstand packing and distribution and arrive with the qualities required to provide the appropriate dose to the cat.
The testing was used to quickly screen a few prototype formulations on a very small scale (10 g) to identify promising formulation candidates for progression into more detailed studies. In running a few tests on the formulations from the customer we were able to save them time and money during the manufacturing phase.
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