FORMULATION AND EVALUATION OF FLOATING TAPENTADOL HCL TABLETS

The oral route is the predominant and most preferable route for drug delivery, but drug absorption is unsatisfactory and highly variable in individuals despite excellent vitro release patterns. Analgesics having similar effectiveness with improved compliance in comparison to opioids are valuable additions to the analgesic armamentarium. Polymers used in the drug delivery system are of two types Natural and Synthetic based on their origin. Both types of polymers have some advantages and disadvantages. This results in prolonged gastric retention time of floating forms which improve bioavailability of drug and improve clinical situations. FDDS is one amongst the GRDF’s used to achieve prolonged gastric residence time. From the experimental results obtained, F4 formulation has been selected as the best formulation among all the other formulations. The in vitro drug dissolution studies from the formulation were found to be controlled release. All the evaluation parameters obtained from the best formulation were found to be satisfactory. Based on the observations, prepared tablets were analysed for various parameters like weight variation, hardness, thickness, friability, swelling and floating time, In-vitro drug release, extended to 10 hours, with formulation F4 demonstrating 83.9% drug release has been seen. Key words: Tapentadol HCL, Gastric residence time, Floating tablets, Hydrochloride.