Abstract
We demonstrate the ability to fabricate dosage forms of a poorly water-soluble drug by using wet stirred media milling of a drug powder to produce an aqueous suspension of nanoparticles and then print it onto a porous biocompatible film. Contrary to conventional printing technologies, a deposited material is pulled out from the nozzle. This feature enables printing highly viscous materials with a precise control over the printed volume. Drug (griseofulvin) nanosuspensions prepared by wet media milling were printed onto porous hydroxypropyl methylcellulose films prepared by freeze-drying. The drug particles retained crystallinity and polymorphic form in the course of milling and printing. The versatility of this technique was demonstrated by printing the same amount of nanoparticles onto a film with droplets of different sizes. The mean drug content (0.19–3.80 mg) in the printed films was predicted by the number of droplets (5–100) and droplet volume (0.2–1.0 µL) (R2 = 0.9994, p-value < 10−4). Our results also suggest that for any targeted drug content, the number-volume of droplets could be modulated to achieve acceptable drug content uniformity. Analysis of the model-independent difference and similarity factors showed consistency of drug release profiles from films with a printed suspension. Zero-order kinetics described the griseofulvin release rate from 1.8% up to 82%. Overall, this study has successfully demonstrated that the electro-hydrodynamic drop-on-demand printing of an aqueous drug nanosuspension enables accurate and controllable drug dosing in porous polymer films, which exhibited acceptable content uniformity and reproducible drug release.
Original language | English (US) |
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Article number | 1034 |
Pages (from-to) | 1-18 |
Number of pages | 18 |
Journal | Pharmaceutics |
Volume | 12 |
Issue number | 11 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Nov 2020 |
All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes
- Pharmaceutical Science
Keywords
- Biocompatible films
- Drop-on-demand printing
- Drug release profile
- Nanoparticles
- Poorly water-soluble drugs
- Precision dosage form