Natural Superdisintegrants:Changed Scenario and Latest Advances

All pharmaceutical dosage forms contain many additives besides the active ingredients to assist manufacturing and to obtain the desired effect of the pharmaceutical active ingredients. The advances in drug delivery have simultaneously urged the discovery of novel excipients which are safe and fulfil specific functions and directly or indirectly influence the rate and extent of release and /or absorption. Superdisintegrants are added to oral solid dosage formulations to facilitate fast disintegration. The plant derived natural super disintegrants comply with many requirements of pharmaceutical excipients as they are non-toxic, stable, easily available, associated with less regulatory issues as compared to their synthetic counterpart and inexpensive; also these can be easily modified to meet the specific need. They can also be modified in different ways to obtain tailor-made materials for drug delivery systems and thus can compete with the available synthetic excipients. Recent trend towards the use of plant based and natural products demands the replacement of synthetic additives with natural ones. Plant products nowadays are widely used as an alternative to synthetic products due to ease of local accessibility, lower prices as compared to synthetic products, biocompatible, biodegradable nature and environment friendly nature. Extensive swelling, porosity and wicking action of the natural material in the tablet formulation were found to be contributing its superdisintegrant action. This review discusses about the development and extraction of natural superdisintegrants for use in the rapidly disintegrating dosage forms.