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Article / Jul 01, 2010

Scale-up methodology for pharmaceutical spray drying

Authors:
  • Marco Gil
  • Joao Vicente
  • Filipe Gaspar
Source:
Chemistry Today, July/August 2010

The use of spray drying in the pharmaceutical industry is growing at a fast pace. The need for robust scale-up methods is essential in order to control critical quality attributes and improve powder properties during drug development. Moreover, poor scale-up is likely to lead to considerable losses of expensive materials. Process understanding and simulation is a very powerful tool to support the scale-up of spray drying processes. A scale-up methodology based on scientific principles is proposed in this study. The method is divided in two steps: thermodynamic and atomization & particle formation. The method is relatively straightforward to apply and has been tested in numerous spray-dried formulations across all production scales. An illustrative example is also shown covering the main steps of the proposed methodology.