(194e) Improving the Properties of Pharmaceutical Powders Using Atomic Layer Coating

Coatings are used on Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (API) in the pharmaceutical industry to enhance mechanical strength, enable controlled release, taste masking, reduce formulation complexity and/or to improve drug product stability. Currently, the coating technologies used on APIs have many challenges related to coating uniformity and defects, leading to variations in drug performance. This paper discusses using an ultra-thin API coating technology adapted from the semiconductor industry that can address many of the shortcomings of current coating technologies commonly used in the pharmaceutical industry. We show that this technique can achieve uniform, pin-hoe free and conformal nano-coating on multiple APIs without impacting their specific surface area and particle size distribution. In this talk, we describe how the API particles are coated and characterize the coatings. Further, we demonstrate enhancement to the powder flow properties of the drug and the ability to customize the release of the drug using vapor phase coatings. The improvement in the processability of coated API was compared against uncoated APIs in commercially relevant unit operations used in the pharmaceutical industry, such as a loss in weight screw feeder and rotary tablet press.