Enhancing virtual tablet design

Traditional pharmaceutical formulation design is driven by trial and error experimentation. With increasing optimisation of clinical development, designing robust formulations and well characterised manufacturing processes can become a rate limiting step to making new medicines routinely available to patients. The use of materials databases combined with predictive models to link desired product performance with formulation design has the potential to dramatically optimise and accelerate this stage of development.

Predicting the performance of structured mixtures of formulated powders remains a significant challenge. The scope is potentially broad, so will be limited to developing models to predict the strength and porosity of directly compressed pharmaceutical powders, including understanding the influence of strain rate and additional surface modifying components such as lubricants. Optimising a formulation for strength alone runs the risk of inhibiting release and therefore the structure and composition will be linked with in-vitro disintegration performance. Additionally, characterisation an classification of the mechanical and physico-chemical properties of the formulation components will be key to developing predictive modelling capability.

Detailed characterisation of physical and mechanical properties of representative pharmaceutical materials. Detailed compaction simulation of these materials including influence of strain rate and extent of lubrication. Detailed characterisation of tablets, including mechanical strength, structure and disintegration performance. Developing and apply models to describe individual component contributions to bulk strength, tablet porosity and disintegration performance. This output will result in a substantial materials and process database upon which linkages of materials to process to product can be built to inform modelling.