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Pharma - Consumer Health

Oral formulations

The development of oral drugs and formulations presents several challenges, including low solubility, instability of the formulation and ineffective delivery of the IFA. The selection of the correct oral excipient during the initial stage of development is a critical step in achieving the success of the formulation.

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Super Refined™ products for oral formulations

Our Super Refined™ technology produces high-purity excipients, which provide several benefits in a formulation for oral products. These benefits include:

  • Increased stability of the product
  • Improved stability in gelatin capsules
  • Less impact of taste, odour and colour. 

As a result, they optimise the bioavailability of the product and its shelf life, increase patient compliance and reduce the development, decreasing the time to market.

Super Refined Excipients for Oral Drug Delivery

Super Refined Excipients for Oral Drug Delivery Brochure Croda Pharma
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How we mitigate the taste of excipients in oral formulations

Degree of difference (DOD) scale diagram

Super Refined excipients have minimal taste compared to their standard pharmaceutical equivalent grades, resulting in more palatable patient medicines. To demonstrate this, our Super Refined excipients and their standard pharmaceutical equivalent grades were tested by a panel of trained taste specialists (Sensory Spectrum, Inc.) to quantitatively identify the degree of difference in taste. The Degree of Difference (DOD) scores ranged from 0-10, with 0 indicating no difference and 10 indicating an extreme difference. A DOD of 5 or higher indicates that consumers will be able to perceive a difference in taste, while a DOD of 4-5 indicates a consumer might perceive a difference in taste.

The chart shows that the DOD between Super Refined Polysorbate 80 and its Polysorbate 80 NF benchmark was assigned as 8, indicating that Super Refined Polysorbate 80 has a consumer perceivable taste difference compared to its compendial grade. This has also been shown to be the case with other Super Refined excipients, supporting their use in formulating more palatable oral liquid dosage forms in order to improve patient compliance and outcomes.

What are SEDDS and SMEDDS?

Watch our animation to learn more!

We offer high purity, multi-compendial, pharmaceutical excipients for small molecule drug delivery. Our portfolio of high purity excipient products and speciality chemistries solve formulation challenges and enhance drug delivery across a variety of administration routes and dosage forms.

Discover our Super Refined™ range

Many lipid and surfactant ingredients have an inherent taste to them, which can make delivering oral solutions difficult to patients, especially children. Our ingredients have been shown to have a milder taste than other standard compendial versions in the market, ultimately improving patient compliance.
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