Solvent-free drug crystal engineering for drug nano- and micro suspensions

Poor water-solubility is becoming the leading hurdle for novel drug molecules to reach the market. Enhancing the surface-to-volume ratio by reducing the drug particles size has emerged as a powerful method to enhance the drug dissolution rate of poorly water-soluble drugs. Here we present several approaches to produce micro- and nano-suspensions of febantel and itraconazole, as poorly water-soluble model drugs, in the presence of the self-emulsifying excipient Gelucire 44/14 as additional solubility enhancing agent. Two top-down approaches involving either ball milling or ultrasound treatment, to reduce the size of existing drug crystals, were used as reference processes. Both techniques allowed to significantly reduce the size of the drug crystals and enhance the dissolution of febantel with the ultrasound treated formulation performing the best. In case of itraconazole, no influence of both processing techniques was observed, which is likely to be attributed to it is extremely low water-solubility. To address this challenge, we developed a novel bottom up approach to produce nanosuspensions. This approach involved first dissolving the drug in molten Gelucire 44/14 followed by atomization into cold water. During the atomization, cavitation was induced by ultrasonication. This process yielded milky suspensions in the submicrometer range. Furthermore a fraction of the drug was found to be in amorphous state. Nanosuspensions produced by this technique showed improved dissolution behavior, both in case of febantel and itraconazole.

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