Pharmaceutical binders also called pharmaceutical adhesives, play a pivotal role in tablet formulation, beneficial from their outstanding abilities to improve the tablet quality, stability, and bioavailability, facilitate productive process, strengthen patient compliance and satisfy the needs for special formulations. If you want to get the high-quality, enhanced-performance, aesthetic and sustainable tablets, wisely selecting binders suitable to your specific applications is above everything.

1. Why Use Binders in Tablet Formulations?

1.1 Maximize efficiency without compromising quality of tableting process

In terms of the nature of APIs, binders used in tablet formulation like cellulose and starch are able to enhance the adhesivity among the ingredients that lack the adhesive property inherent in themselves in order to improve the compressibility and compactibility of the pharmaceutical products, increasing the success rate of tablet compression. In the light of preparation technology, the hydrophilic binders can be used to streamline the wet granulation process to make for the consistent tablets featuring aesthetic appearance and superior abrasive resisting property. The binders with the prime thermoplastic and resilient features including hydroxypropyl cellulose (HPC) and microcrystalline cellulose (MCC) enable the dry granulation and direct compression method, which are friendly to those moisture and heat-sensitive APIs, highly efficient in cost, energy, and procedures. Ensuring both tableting efficiency and quality is a big challenge but Miedykol is proficient in striking a balance between them with the high-class and -performance binder products.

1.2 Ameliorate bioavailability and meet specific needs in drug delivery systems

Another significance for binders in tablet formulation lies in their key function for pharmaceutical effect playing. This is because the most of binders serve as a disintegrant too that promotes the dosage forms disintegrating into small particles upon contacting with a liquid medium such as gastrointestinal fluid. This process facilitates the release of the APIs for dissolution and subsequent absorption by different location in human body, thereby enhancing the bioavailability of the drug. What’s more, with the evolving requirement in increasing patient compliance, the modern pharmacy has seen the success in development of novel drug delivery systems such as sustained and controlled release preparation, in which the pharmaceutical binders have been arguably the fundamental element to control the release speed, time and site. Keeping pace with the latest demand and technology is the source of sustainable development for Miedykol, which allows its offering of best binders and formulation guide based on diverse new drug delivery systems.

2. How Binders Work to Give Solid Powders the Cohesion?

The pharmaceutical binder or adhesive is in forms of solid powders or solutions used to assist the APIs of underviscosity or without viscosity to form the granules. The solid binder is typically adopted in dry granulation and compression process while the solution forms usually in wet granulation tableting. And their mechanism of action include:

(1) Liquid bridge force. When liquid penetrates into the solid powders, it will bond the powders together relying on surface tension and capillary force, and this binding force is known as liquid bridge force, also the primary binding force form before the drying of wet granules. The powder shapes ably combined by liquid bridge force are in wide variety such as the like of clock pendulums, strips, capillaries, and drops.

(2) Solid bridge force. During the process of drying wet granules, most water will be removed and the liquid bridge force will be greatly impaired, but the powder remain combined together, which is resulted from the solid bridge force. This force can be formed under the following conditions: (a) produce binding particles by binders; (b) the soluble ingredients crystallize between adjacent particles; (c) the material generate heat under the pressure, leading to a rise in lo temperature, which cause the liquation of certain ingredients among the powder particles and subsequently form the solid bridge force.

(3) VDW (Van der Waals' force) and surface free energy. When dry granulation is adopted, it is by the mechanical force of compression that drying binders close the distance between the particles. And the principal binding forces include intermolecular forces and surface free energy.

The selection and use of adhesives in tablet formulations needs to be adjusted according to the specific drug composition and tablet needs to ensure the best forming effect and drug release characteristics, Miedykol offers high quality adhesives such as HPMC, MCC, EC, etc., to better meet the production needs.