Review of Terahertz Pulsed Imaging for Pharmaceutical Film Coating Analysis

Terahertz pulsed imaging (TPI) was introduced approximately fifteen years ago and has attracted a lot of interest in the pharmaceutical industry as a fast, non-destructive modality for quantifying film coatings on pharmaceutical dosage forms. In this topical review, we look back at the use of TPI for analysing pharmaceutical film coatings, highlighting the main contributions made and outlining the key challenges ahead.

Introduction

In pharmaceutical manufacturing, film coating on solid oral dosage forms, especially for tablets, is typically performed as the last steps of secondary manufacturing value chain. Coatings are usually applied to cores such as tablets or pellets and in some cases small particles such as crystals. In order to facilitate film formation and processing, coating formulations typically contain polymers and additives such as a plasticizer, anti-adherents, surfactants and colorants [1]. The process of film coating is widely used to ensure colour uniformity, light protection and taste masking of the dosage forms. Functional coating can be used to mask the taste or smell of a product, to protect the active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) against the acidic environment of the stomach or the gastric mucosa against an aggressive API, and to prolong API release. Active coatings contain an API in the coat. They are applied to realise different fixed dose combinations and to prevent interaction of different drugs or to combine different release behaviour in one single solid dosage form. Table 1 provides an overview of different functional coatings.

Get the article as PDF Review of Terahertz Pulsed Imaging for Pharmaceutical Film Coating Analysis

or continue reading the article on Terahertz Pulsed Imaging here

Alves-Lima, D.; Song, J.; Li, X.; Portieri, A.; Shen, Y.; Zeitler, J.A.; Lin, H. Review of Terahertz Pulsed Imaging for Pharmaceutical Film Coating Analysis. Sensors 2020, 20, 1441.
https://doi.org/10.3390/s20051441