Abstract

Oral route remains the gold standard for drug delivery despite the new trends in the development of complex biotech therapeutic agents under specialty or biologic categories. This is mainly due to the patient preference for solid dosage forms, convenience of administration, accuracy of dosing, and therefore safety of the patients. In addition, the technologies involved in development and manufacture of tablets and capsules are well established and understood by scientists and regulators. Moreover there is a huge capacity, and capability already exists in most corners of the world, which means no new significant investments are required in order to develop and manufacture tablets and capsules. The development time of solid dosage forms is generally short, and manufacturing is fast, with high yields. The finished solid dose products exhibit very good stability when formulated and packaged appropriately. Therefore, the most common dosage types for oral drug delivery are tablets and capsules, and they will remain popular by the producers and users. According to the IMS Health data [1], total pharmaceutical market in 2015 was more than $950 billion (USD) with a compound annual growth of around 5% over the last 3–5 years. Over $475 billion were oral solid dosage forms consisting a staggering 1675 billion counting units of solid dosages in 2015. Multiparticulate sales were in the order of $34 billion and around 91 billion counting units and a growth of around 6% in 2015. There are many drug products in the market place that use multiparticulate drug delivery technology and an increasing number of pipeline products which are under development.

Link to Book