— In recent years, formulations based on pellets have been the trend. New technologies make it possible to circumvent property rights for active ingredients and are therefore very popular with pharmaceutical customers. But which technologies are the most important?

Pellets are the jack-of-all-trades of solid dosage forms. Positioned somewhere between powder and granulate, they make bitter medicine more palatable and can even awaken a child’s instinct to play when the dosage forms are imaginative enough. One well-known example is the Xstraw, a plastic tube shaped like a drinking straw which is filled with pellets of active ingredient, through which children or elderly people can take in the medicine with water.

 

Pellets Allow New Technologies

Pellets in tablets are also making a splash — hybrids which combine all the advantages of both dosage forms. The pioneers in the development of these formulations, known as Multiple Unit Pellet Systems (or MUPS for short), was Astra Zeneca in 1999. Their move to embed the proton pump inhibitor Omeprazole in micropellets and then compress these pellets into immediate release tablets was an award-winning one at the time. The development of MUPS and Xstraw symbolizes the impetus pellets have fueled in recent years.

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