Abstract
Treatment of Soluplus® with supercritical carbon dioxide allows promising applications in preparing dispersions of amorphous solids. Several characterization techniques were employed to reveal this effect, including CO2 gas sorption under high pressure and physicochemical characterizations techniques. A gravimetric method was used to determine the solubility of carbon dioxide in the polymer at elevated pressure. The following physicochemical characterizations were used: thermal analysis, X-ray diffraction, Fourier transform, infrared spectroscopy and scanning electron microscopy. Drug loading of the polymer with ibuprofen as a model drug was also investigated. The proposed treatment with supercritical carbon dioxide allows to prepare solid solutions of Soluplus® in less than two hours at temperatures that do not exceed 45 °C, which is a great advantage to be used for thermolabile drugs. The advantages of using this technology for Soluplus® formulations lies behind the high sorption capability of carbon dioxide inside the polymer. This will ensure rapid diffusion of the dissolved/dispersed drug inside the polymer under process conditions and rapid precipitation of the drug in the amorphous form during depressurization accompanied by foaming of the polymer.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to acknowledge Scientific Research Funds (SRF) at Ministry of Higher Education (Amman, Jordan) for providing our lab with SFT unit (MPH/2/15/2013), Deanship of Research at Jordan University of Science and Technology (JUST) for analysis and administrative support, and (Eurotechnica, GmbH, Germany) for providing the High-Pressure Magnetic Suspension Balance.
Disclosure statement
The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of this article.