Easier to tablet

THE proverbial bitter pill may just get a little bit smaller and easier to swallow. A Japanese company has developed a new method for giving pharmaceuticals the form of tablets. And tablets developed through this system will not only disintegrate readily in the mouth, making it possible to have them without water, but will also be smaller. The company hopes to achieve this by cutting down on substances that have to be added to the tablet to make them easier to swallow (Science & Technology in Japan, Vol 18, No 69).

The method has been developed by Kyowa Hakko Kogyo Co Ltd of Japan, and is known as External Lubrication System (exlub). The company is going to introduce this method all over the world.

Tablets are compacted by a tableting machine from the mixture of an active ingredient with a 'binding agent' and 'excipient'. A binding agent is a substance that serves as an adhesive to bind the main ingredient and other components in a tablet, which can be cellulose, for example. An excipient is a substance added to make the drug easy to ingest, lactose being one example. During this tableting process, high compression force is applied to the mixture, and a lubricant is added to prevent the mixture from adhering to components of the tableting machine, such as punches and dies. In this process, the lubricant is distributed in the whole tablet.

On the other hand, exlub puts the lubricant only on the surface of tablets. This it does by an apparatus that accurately sprays a small amount of lubricant on the punches and dies.

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