Taste-Masking

Taste-Masking

The Key to Making Patients Better- Without the Bitter!

The success of your orally administered tablet may depend on how easy and pleasant it is for patients to take. At SPI Pharma, we understand the complex relationship between the taste of active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) and their chemical properties. If a tablet has a bitter or unpleasant taste, it can lead to patient noncompliance or even a failed product launch. That’s why taste-masking is an essential part of our product development process. 

Contact us

There are several challenges when taste-masking a drug. When the simple addition of flavors and sweeteners fail, one must consider the addition of a physical barrier around the drug particle to prevent direct contact with the taste buds on the tongue. The coating must provide sufficient barrier properties to mask taste when the dose form is in the oral cavity and yet dissolve quick enough to not retard drug release when the dose form particles pass into the GI tract. Finding the balance between dissolution and taste masking of the drug is not easy and requires expertise.

Our range of drug taste-masking technology includes coacervation. Some of the critical aspects of a drug that we take into account when developing a taste-making approach are:

• Bitterness
• Dose
• Particle size
• Particle shape
• Solubility

The next challenge is to formulate the taste-masked drug into a solid dose form with acceptable organoleptic properties. Our range of taste-masking formulation development includes the incorporation of our highly functional excipients along with our co-processed delivery systems. For more information on how we can help taste-mask your active ingredient.