Film coating of solid oral drugs is a well-established process in the pharmaceutical industry.

 

A tailor-made coating for your tablets

Skyepharma is extending its fleet of coating equipment with a brand-new LC M50 machine (O’HARA technologies). Skyepharma is now able to propose coating services from early development to industrial commercial batches with development strategies fine-tuned to your needs.

The O’HARA tablet coating machine is equipped with multiple interchangeable pans, allowing to cover small scale (0.2 to 2 kg) to large scale (15 to 50kg) batch sizes. In addition, the O’Hara pan coater is data integrity certified, GMP compliant and ATEX, thus fully suitable for both aqueous and organic coatings!

The recent acquisition of the O’Hara pan coater equipment will definitely fill a gap for the manufacture of low to mid-size batches at Skyepharma. This will particularly be suitable for orphan drug products developed for rare diseases requiring a small batch size, “declares Vanessa BOURGEAUX, Project Manager in pharmaceutical development department at Skyepharma.

O'Hara Labcoat™ M50 Tablet Coating System
O'Hara Labcoat™ M50 Tablet Coating System

Coating: get premium tablets

Tablet coating process is generally the last step in tablet manufacture, just after compression. It allows to:

  • Protect tablets from external aggressions by a physical barrier,
  • Protect hygroscopic pills from humidity,
  • Modulate API release (active ingredient): sustained, delayed, etc.
  • Color the tablet to ease its visual identification and safety, or for cosmetic reasons,
  • Make it easier to swallow Improve therapeutic adherence by facilitating drug intake (for young or elderly or patients suffering from dysphagia) and by masking the intrinsic characteristics of the active ingredient (taste or smell).

 

Expertise in coating formulation

In addition to a wide range from benchtop equipment to high-capacity industrial pans, Skyepharma has developed a unique expertise in pharmaceutical coating thanks to its development teams.

Depending on your needs, the most appropriate coating solutions will be formulated with high quality pharma-grade excipients to reach targeted coated tablets’ attributes.

Additionally, using FMEA (Failure Mode Effect Analysis) approach, our team of experts will identify the critical process parameters that are specific to your drug product and will propose you an optimal and robust process for the routine manufacturing of your coated tablets.

Improving bioavailability, decreasing toxicity and side effects, or designing and improving the release profile of the drug, are key objectives for formulators. This can be done, for example, through gastro-resistant polymers keeping the active ingredient intact in the stomach and releasing it in the intestine.  They can also protect the gastric mucosa from irritating by the active ingredients.

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