Development and Evaluation of Celecoxib Core in Cup Tablets for Pulsatile Drug Delivery

Chronopharmaceutics, the drug delivery based on circadian rhythm is recently gaining much attention worldwide. Keeping an objective celecoxib pulsatile core-in-cup tablet was designed to deliver a rapid or transient and quantified drug after a predetermined lag period. Celecoxib core tablet was prepared by direct compression method and is used to prepare a set of core-in-cup tablets with swellable and rupturable polymers with different proportions with impermeable cup ethyl cellulose. Tablets were evaluated for precompression, postcompression and in vitro dissolution. The drug polymer interaction was studied by FTIR. The precompression data of core/core-in-cup tablet were within the acceptable limit and they can be compressed directly into tablets. The hardness, friability and uniformity in weight and disintegration time results were in accordance with the standard limit. The lag time is dependents on rupturing property of ehtyl cellulose and swelling property polymers. In all the formulations the best fit model was found to be peppas with exponential n value is > 1 indicates the drug release follows super case II transport mechanism. The initial burst release was observed after lag time and drug release was extended up to 12hr in all formulations. The in vitro drug release studies suggest that core-in-cup tablet prepared with ethyl cellulose and sodium alginate shows higher lag time than that of remaining formulations due to more swelling and delayed rupturing properties of sodium alginate and ethyl cellulose.