| AN IMPRECISE SCIENCE
Ensuring the correct dosage of
milligram amounts of powders into
capsules has traditionally been a difficult
and imprecise science for pharmaceutical
companies, particularly as the material
is significantly lighter than the weight of
the capsule shell.
Administration of minute amounts of
drugs into hard gelatine capsules, for
instance, can be problematic due to the
forces of agglomeration and cohesion,
resulting in a poor flow which could
cause the weight of the dose to fluctuate
between 15 and 20 per cent – an
unacceptable condition when handling
pharmaceutical products.
ADVANCING AUTOMATION
In the search for a process which can
automatically provide accurate and precise
weight measurements for dispensing
microdoses of powder into capsules,
significant advances have been made.
Until now, this process has mostly been
carried out on standard automatic
machines that have been adapted with
dosing mechanisms to handle such small
quantities of powder, but because capsules
were not weighed prior to filling, it was
impossible to make reliable estimations as
to the weight of the capsule’s content. |
