IFF Pharma Solutions: Paving the Way for Superior Suspensions

Shawn Branning, Global Strategic Marketing Manager at IFF – Pharma Solutions

However, suspensions require a careful balance of ingredients to ensure a positive sensory experience, along with drug efficacy. In addition to the active pharmaceutical ingredient (API), there are multiple excipients needed to ensure a uniform and stable drug product, with pleasant taste and mouthfeel. By adding the right blend of polymers, formulators can ensure that their suspension is stable and effective, while also appealing to patients.

Common Formulation Challenges

Like any drug, there are several challenges formulators face when creating suspensions, including:

1. Ensuring a uniform, stable drug product. Even the most time-tested pharmaceutical ingredients can falter if they’re not paired with the right thickening and suspending agents, which results in destabilized formulations that don’t perform as intended.
2. Maintaining viscosity and pourability of the drug for efficacious drug delivery. At rest, more viscosity is needed to help stabilize the active pharmaceutical agent within the suspension to prevent sedimentation and aggregation of the particles.
3. Retaining sensory attributes, like mouthfeel and taste, for a pleasant drug experience. A better sensory experience leads to increased patient compliance. However, the challenge lies in taste masking bitter APIs and ensuring mouthfeel isn’t chalky or gritty.

How Can IFF Pharma Solutions Help?

Our broad range of excipients offers formulators the solutions needed to face these formulation challenges head-on. Those struggling to ensure uniformity and stability can consider Avicel® colloidal microcrystalline cellulose (cMCC). It forms a gel-like network, is thixotropic and remains stable over a wide range of pH and temperatures. It also has a long shelf-life and superior mouthfeel, making it an ideal suspending aid.

Challenges related to viscosity and pourability can be mitigated with the use of GRINDSTED® Xanthan PRM. Its pronounced shear-thinning behavior enables handling of even highly viscous solutions. It can be used as a secondary ingredient to another suspending agent such as cMCC, especially as a viscosifier, while also adding to the stabilization of oral liquid formulations.

Ingredients in a suspension can oftentimes work against each other to create an end-product that’s gritty or chalky. These textural aspects can be easily adjusted by utilizing different excipients at varying levels. For example, low-use levels of GRINDSTED® Xanthan Gum or TEXTURECEL™ NaCMC can be used to improve mouthfeel; TEXTURECEL™ NaCMC also provides clear and transparent solutions with no taste or odor.

Helping Drive the Future of Pharma

By working with IFF, formulators have access to a streamlined supply of excipient solutions, as well as the added benefits of our broad portfolio, regulatory support, and expertise as a pharmaceutical-focused business – all of which ensure an optimized end-product that achieves the desired results.

We’re interested in being more than just a supplier. We’re here to build partnerships that help our customers deliver a greater variety of drug delivery formats that patients need and will be more likely to take.