Design and fabrication of 3D-printed gastric floating tablets of captopril: effect of geometry and thermal crosslinking of polymer on floating behavior and drug release

Abstract

The present study aims to investigate the potential of the 3D printing technique to design gastroretentive floating tablets (GFTs) for modifying the drug release profile of an immediate-release tablet. A 3D-printed floating shell enclosing a captopril tablet was designed having varying number of drug-release windows. The impact of geometrical changes in the design of delivery system and thermal cross-linking of polymers were evaluated to observe the influence on floating ability and drug release. Water uptake, water insolubilization, Differential Scanning Calorimetry (DSC), and Attenuated Total Reflection-Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (ATR-FTIR) were performed to assess the degree of thermal cross-linking of polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) filament. The 3D-printed GFT9 was considered the optimized gastric floating tablet that exhibited >12 h of total floating time with zero floating lag time and successfully accomplished modified-drug release by exhibiting >80% of drug release in 8 h. The zero-order release model, with an r² value of 0.9923, best fitted the drug release kinetic data of the GFT9, which followed a super case II drug transport mechanism with an n value of 0.95. The optimized gastric floating device (GFT9) also exhibited the highest MDT values (238.55), representing slow drug release from the system due to thermal crosslinking and the presence of a single drug-releasing window in the device.

Graphical Abstract

Keywords:

• 3D printing
• fused deposition modeling
• gastroretentive floating tablet
• thermal crosslinking
• buoyancy
• drug dissolution
• release kinetics

Acknowledgment

The authors are thankful to the Deanship of Scientific Research at Najran University for funding this work, under the General Research Funding program grant code (NU/DRP/MRC/12/33).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by the Deanship of Scientific Research at Najran University, Najran, Saudi Arabia, under the General Research Funding program grant code (NU/DRP/MRC/12/33).