Spray Drying in Pharmaceutical Industry:A Review

Spray drying is an interesting manufacturing technique for the pharmaceutical industry since it uses a one-step process for formation and drying of powders. Using this technique the number of unit operations is reduced, improving production efficiency and reducing costs, especially since spray drying is a technique which can be easily automated and equipped for in-line product analysis. In addition, spray drying can be considered a continuous process, thus reducing time-to-market because of scale-up benefits and better quality. Spray drying has a wide range of applications in the pharmaceutical and biotech industry. It is a convenient method to produce (coprocessed) excipients. Spray drying is applied to improve the compactability of drugs and to perform microencapsulation, granulation and complex formation. In addition, spray drying is successfully used for the modification of biopharmaceutical properties and the formulation of dry powder aerosols and heat sensitive materials.