International journal of pharmaceutics
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WHO estimates that 10% of drugs are falsified. Economic and health factors arising from the use of counterfeit drugs lead to the development of new methods for distinguishing genuine medicines from falsified ones. The purpose of this study was to develop a new, fast, and inexpensive method to distinguish between original and fake drugs. 10 counterfeit Viagra(®) tablets were compared to 4 original pills (Pfizer). ⋯ Differences in the dynamics of temperature changes as a function of time are particularly pronounced in the range of t+2 to t+7 min. The comparison of the time constants τ enables to distinguish between genuine and counterfeit drugs. The proposed new method which uses dynamic thermal analysis is an effective, cheap and fast technique to distinguish genuine drugs from counterfeit ones.
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The feasibility of a novel reverse-phase wet granulation process has been established previously and several potential advantages over the conventional process have been highlighted (Wade et al., 2014a,b,b). Due to fundamental differences in the growth mechanism and granule consolidation behaviour between the two processes the reverse-phase approach generally formed granules with a greater mass mean diameter and a lower intragranular porosity than those formed by the conventional granulation process under the same liquid saturation and impeller tip speed conditions. The lower intragranular porosity was hypothesised to result in an increase in the granule strength and subsequent decrease in tablet tensile strength. ⋯ No correlation was found between mean granule fracture strength and the tablet tensile strength (p>0.05) for either granulation approach. These data support the rejection of the original hypothesis which stated that an increase in granule strength may result in a decrease in the tablet tensile strength. The similar tablet tensile strength observed between the conventional and reverse-phase granulation processes indicated that while mechanistic differences exist in the formation of the granules, which resulted in significant granule-scale fracture strength differences, the granule compaction properties at pharmaceutically relevant tableting pressures were unaffected.