Explore expert perspectives, scientific advances, and practical strategies to help develop medicines that patients are willing to take.
Do you have an idea for a future topic? We’d like to hear from you at feedback@senopsys.com.
A neighbor slipped and fell in his driveway. He was unable to get up and was taken to the hospital by ambulance. Before medical treatment could be initiated, the hospital needed to run diagnostic tests, e.g., x-ray, MRI. The same is true for developing palatable formulations – it’s not enough to know that it tastes “yucky” as there’s no universal “yummy” excipient.
It is widely recognized that young children cannot swallow traditional tablets, but difficulty in swallowing tablets (dysphagia) is not limited to children. An estimated 40% of adults report difficulty in swallowing tablets, which is increasingly common among older patients. How can the formulation scientist address these important patient needs, and how can “swallowability” even be quantitatively measured?
Try this experiment next time you are in a coffee shop: Open a packet of artificial sweetener (pink, yellow, or blue) and pour it directly on your tongue. Yuck! That tasted nothing like a spoonful of sugar – so what happened? Though artificial sweeteners are widely used in pharmaceuticals, formulating with them is far from straightforward.
If you’re a Disney fan of a certain age, you probably can sing the lyrics to Mary Poppins Spoonful of Sugar Makes the Medicine Go Down. Many APIs are known to be bitter, some extremely so. The addition of flavor – orange, grape, berry, chocolate – cannot reduce bitterness as taste and smell have different perception pathways. Rather bitterness is reduced by blending with the complementary basic tastes – sweet, sour and salty – through the mechanism of taste/taste interaction. When properly blended, the result is a neutral tasting (“white”) base in which the basic tastes are not separately perceived.
To a sensory scientist “flavor” refers to all tastes, aromas, mouthfeels and textures of a product. To a formulator, a flavor is a commercial ingredient that is a blend of volatile chemicals responsible for imparting the aroma of a product. In this post, we’ll focus on the formulator’s view, describing how these commercial “flavors” are created.
Recently, a strange noise from my car required a trip to the mechanic. Before the garage can start repairs, they need to diagnose the problem – is it a worn clutch or an exhaust? The same is true for developing palatable formulations – it’s not enough to know that it tastes “yucky” as there’s no universal “yummy” ingredient.
Sensory analysis is a scientific discipline used to evoke, measure, analyze, and interpret those responses to products that are perceived by the senses of sight, smell, touch, taste, and hearing. In our latest blog post we describe the methods most commonly employed to guide the development of palatable, taste-masked drug products.
By: David Tisi – Senopsys Technical Director “Flavor”, “Taste”, and “Smell” are not the same. To a sensory scientist, the term “flavor” refers to the combination of taste, aroma, mouthfeel and texture. This definition is important as we debunk one of the great myths of taste masking: that taste and smell are the same.
By: David Tisi – Senopsys Technical Director Many Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (APIs) are bitter, some extremely so. Often a formulator’s first reaction to taste masking is to add a “flavor” to the formulation to mask the bitterness. This approach to taste making is not usually successful because of differences in the physiology of taste and
By: Jeff Worthington – Senopsys President and Founder Many drug actives are bitter or have other aversive attributes that require effective taste masking. Senopsys penned an article for Contract Pharma that describes the framework for developing palatable drug products advanced by the AAPS Pediatric Formulations Task Force. The framework is a decision-tree that identifies the