Abstract
In this piece of work we investigated the effect of milling time on the release of meloxicam from the meloxicam-HPMC mixture. Meloxicam, a well-known non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug, is poorly water-soluble drug which affects its bioavailability. For this reason many studies were performed to ensure its solubility. Milling of the pharmaceutical active ingredient nowadays pays researchers attention in order enhance the drug solubility via reduction particles size and/ or through amorphisation.
Recently, milling of the drug is consider as a green area for the production of amorphous solid dispersion due to the avoidance of solvent usage and heat. Polymers which are water soluble such as HPMC were used in the production of amorphous material due to its stabilisation and solubilisation effect.
In this work different milling time 10, 20, 30, 40 and 60 minutes were chosen for meloxicam-HPMC mixture. Then the dissolution study was performed using phosphate buffer at pH 7.4 for 120 minutes dissolution time. The effect of HPMC on the release was studied. Our results showed that the % of the drug release from meloxicam-HPMC mixture increased with increasing milling time. Furthermore, the release of meloxicam in the presence of polymer was higher than release of the drug alone. This could be attributed to the reduction in the particle size or due to the appearance of amorphous form after milling which increased with increasing milling time. Polymer enhances drug release by its solubilising and stabilising effect. This pre-formulation study is important for pharmaceutical industry to formulate this drug with easy and low cost method of preparation.