Co-Processed Excipients for Tabletting

Tablets and capsules are more popular dosage forms have many advantages include more patient compliance, light, compact, easy and inexpensive manufacturing, high stability and accurate dose administration. The various problems associated with the formulation of tablets can be overcome by incorporation of suitable excipients. The excipients have now their own well defined role in a formulation. To gain better tablet properties, it is necessary to develop new excipients. But it requires a lot of money and regulatory terms, and all required characteristics could not be expected from a single excipient material. So there came an option of combining the existing excipients. This was found to be an excellent method of developing new excipients with desirable properties but there were chances of interference of properties of both the excipients which results in a negative effect. This led to the search of new processes for developing excipients with improved functionalities called particle engineering and co-processing. To create a new excipient, a design of the particle should be created first. The crystal lattice arrangement of the particle is well studied and then the various parameters are changed one by one to find the best excipient with excellent properties resulted in development of single-bodied excipient combination at a sub particle level, called as 'co-processed excipients'. It is based on the concept of interacting two or more excipients at sub particle level. This process helps to mask the undesirable characteristics of individual excipients and at the same time improve the desirable properties. The chemical structure of excipients remained intact during this process. The idea of co-processed excipients is a part of developing excipients by retaining only their good properties. This can be understood from the large number of co-processed excipients that are marketed. But still there is need of deep investigation into the field. A solution should be found out for the problem of non inclusion of these in official pharmacopoeias.