[Study on improvement and mechanism of tableting properties of porous Fagopyri Dibotryis Rhizoma powders].

At present, there are many difficulties in the development and production of traditional Chinese medicine(TCM) tablets. This work aimed to explore the feasibility of improving dissolution difficulty and large dosage of TCM tablets by co-spray drying TCM extract with a small amount of pore-foaming agent ammonium bicarbonate. A series of porous Fagopyri Dibotryis Rhizoma powders were prepared by co-spray drying Fagopyri Dibotryis Rhizoma with different amounts of ammonium bicarbonate, and their powder pro-perties and tablet properties were comparatively investigated. At the same time, Fagopyri Dibotryis Rhizoma commercial tablets and raw material tablets were used as control drugs, the improvement degree of its compressibility and dissolution rate was investigated. The results showed that there were higher porosity, specific surface area and hollow spheroidal particles structure of powders via co-spray drying Fagopyri Dibotryis Rhizoma with NH_4HCO_3. Compared to parent and commercial Fagopyri Dibotryis Rhizoma tablets, the dissolution rates and compressibility of porous Fagopyri Dibotryis Rhizoma tablets were significantly increasing. High compressibility could increase drug loading by reducing excipients in manufacturing of tablets and lower the dose of Fagopyri Dibotryis Rhizoma tablets.

Scaled-up production and application of co-processed excipient mannitol-HPMC in traditional Chinese medicine / 中国中药杂志

Spray drying technology was used to produce co-processed excipients mannitol- hydroxypropyl methylcellulose (HPMC), and study the scaled-up production. The consistency of powder and tablet properties before and after scale-up of co-processed excipients was compared, and their applicability in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) powder's direct compression was tested on five TCM extracts such as gardenia extract and Radix Paeoniae Alba extract. It was shown that after scaled-up production, the key properties of co-processed excipients had little changes (such as compactability, disintegrating time, and lubrication sensitivity) or improvement (such as flowability and yield). As compared to commercially available spray-dried mannitol, co-processed excipients achieved better compactability and higher drug loading for direction compression of TCM powder. In conclusion, the mannitol-HPMC co-processed excipient, with excellent physicomechanical properties, is promising to be explored as a new excipient for direct powder compression.