The effect of bead size and drug solubility on drug release from osmotic granule delivery system for nifedipine

Osmotic granule system which is one of the drug delivery systems has been developed to improve manufacturing process and other problems of tablet osmotic systems. It consists of water swellable seed layer, nifedipine drug layer, and drug release controlled membrane layer and manufactured by fluidized bed coater. The granule size and membrane thickness can be controlled by various amounts of seed and coating solution, respectively. It could be observed that the morphology of osmotic granule was different at each coating step as well as type of coating solution. The bigger the size of granule, the slower the release rate was observed due to decreasing the total specific surface area of granule. Also, it was observed that the increase of membrane thickness was caused to retard the dissolution of nifedipine due to decreasing the water absorption rate. The drug solubility for dissolution media is greatly affected to nifedipine release. From these results, we assured that osmotic granule can be fabricated by fluidized bed coating methods, and the appropriate release profile could be controlled by the controlling of bead size, membrane thickness and dissolution media.