Techniques of tablet coating: Advancement and limitations
The tablet coating is a pharmaceutical operation that is high in popularity today. The tablet coating is essentially a dry coat of sugar or polymeric material that gives the raw tablet specific and unique benefits. Tablet coating ensures the masking of taste and odor. It also ensures all types of physical and chemical protection to the tabletop. The coating also helps protect the drug in the stomach and controls the release of the tablet’s salt profile. The tablet coat is applied to various types of dosage forms that can be ingested orally. The coating can have a characteristic composition of particles, crystals, pellets or granules. According to industry experts, tablet coatings should ensure that there is a significant improvement in the visual, olfactory, sensory as well as the functional quality of the tablet.
Developments in The Tablet Coating Market
The coating composition is applied to tablets in a pan specialized for coating after which the tablet gets covered with polymeric film. Tablets can have coatings of sugar, film as well as a unique enteric coating. Any limitations with other types of tablet and pill coating have been technologically overcome through advancements and extensive research & development.
Recent coating technologies include the practice of directly applying the coating on the tablet surface without any use or inclusions of any solvent.
The guidelines issued by the International Conference on Harmonisation (ICH) state that organic solvents should be avoided in the chemical composition of any type of tablet coat in order to ensure any chemical reaction between the tablet salt and the coat. The tablet coating market caters to the challenges in the tablet coating process, their solutions, strategic advancements, and market evaluation of the coating.
As a limitation faced by the tablet coating market globally, tablet coatings face a relatively high cost, a long time of processing and reaps results that are not directly linked to the qualifications of a pharmacist. The coating process is tedious and requires a highly skilled technician.
Revolutionary Technology Impacting The Tablet Industry
Tablet industry analysis shows thatSupercell technology is an upcoming as well as a revolutionary technology that is having an overarching impact on the operations and the investment costs in the tablet coating industry. This technology helps in accurately depositing the right amount of coating material on tablets in spite of them being highly hygroscopic or friable. Other upcoming tablet technologies include electrostatic dry coating in solventless coatings, magnetically assisted impaction coating, aqueous film coating as well as supercell coating.
Technological and market innovations in the tablet industry have helped eradicate the bitter taste of raw medicine while swallowing. It has also boosted the production and manufacturing process worldwide. Due to the growing chemical complexities of the tablets being manufactured, researchers are finding it arduous to come up with chemically stable coatings that do not have a characteristic odor or taste. Additionally, market analysts advocate and encourage tablet coatings which are environmentally sustainable and have a low carbon footprint.