Pharmaceutical manufacturing of crude drug powder prepared by the surface-modifying method

Crude drug powders are very useful for health and therapeutics, but these powders have various particle shapes and properties, leading to poor fluidity and strong adhesiveness and these properties make handling during processing of the powders and controlling the qualities of products difficult. The granulation of the crude drug seems to be an appropriate procedure to solve the problem. In our last study we examined pharmaceutical manufacture of crude drug powder using the dry compacting method, and we achieved our goal of tablet hardness of about 2.0 kg and disintegration time of less than 1,000 s. In this study, senna powder was chosen and we studied the surface-modifying method. We prepared tablets from surface modified senna powder, surface modified and dry granulated senna powder, and granules by unmodified and dry granulated senna powder and surface modifying agents added at the time of tableting. Their physical properties such as tablet hardness and disintegration time were evaluated. As a result, we achieved our goal of a more than 4.0 kg tablet hardness and less than 600 s disintegration time, when the tablet was made of granules of senna powder modified with 2% surface modification agents and dry granulated, and a disintegrant and more surface modification agents whose total content was 5% in the tablet, and tableting at 200 MPa.