Hot-Melt Extrusion – Enabling Technologies from Dupont

“Hot melt extrusion (HME), a manufacturing technique traditionally used in the plastic and food industries, is now attracting significant interest from the pharmaceutical manufacturing sector. This is primarily because HME enables the continuous manufacture of a wide variety of dosage formulations, including solid dose form, which is of particular importance for poorly soluble APIs.¹ Other advantages of HME technology include the ability to incorporate inline process analytical technology (PAT) – enabling a quality by design (QbD) approach to continuous manufacturing – and the capacity to process a wide range of excipients, many of which cannot be processed using established manufacturing techniques.” Extract from European Pharmaceutical Review – Hot melt extrusion technology for continuous manufacturing

Enabling Technologies from Dupont

AFFINISOL™ HPMC HME is a readily extrudable hydroxypropyl methylcellulose, with processing versatility that requires no plasticizer. It is tailored for solubility enhancement and can offer controlled release formulations produced by HME. While it is capable of being extruded where current HPMC materials fail, it has been designed without modification of the HPMC backbone trusted for safety and performance.

ETHOCEL™ is a versatile and powerful tool in hot-melt extrusion of pharmaceutical formulations, allowing researchers to obtain specific release profiles while producing a wide variety of final dosage forms, including tablets, multiparticulates and core-sheath systems.

POLYOX™ resins extrude extremely well and can easily be used in other types of heat treatments. Many abuse-deterrent technologies take advantage of this property. Easy to use in conventional equipment, POLYOX™ also offers good flow characteristics. POLYOX™ has great film-making properties and can be used in a wide range of temperatures.