The use of solid oral dosage forms depends on the degree of bioavailability of the active pharmaceutical ingredient. The rate and extent of the drug released from the dosage form and subsequently dissolved in the gastrointestinal fluids greatly affects its fate in the human body. In vitro dissolution test may provide an in-depth understanding of a drug formulation's behaviour in vivo, as long as it sufficiently simulates relevant gastrointestinal conditions. Therefore, the development of in vitro gastrointestinal systems, which reflects advanced technology and knowledge about the human body, is receiving considerable attention. This article is focused on the biorelevant dynamic apparatuses and their sophisticated design, overcoming many limitations of conventional dissolution devices and allowing a better correlation with in vivo behaviour of solid oral dosage forms.
Biorelevant dissolution instruments represent an important tool for pharmaceutical research and development. These instruments are designed to simulate the dissolution of drug formulations in conditions most closely mimicking the gastrointestinal tract. In this work, we focused on the optimization of dissolution compartments/vessels for an updated version of the biorelevant dissolution apparatus-Golem v2. We designed eight compartments of uniform size but different inner geometry. The dissolution performance of the compartments was tested using immediate release caffeine tablets and evaluated by standard statistical methods and principal component analysis. Based on two phases of dissolution testing (using 250 and 100 mL of dissolution medium), we selected two compartment types yielding the highest measurement reproducibility. We also confirmed a statistically ssignificant effect of agitation rate and dissolution volume on the extent of drug dissolved and measurement reproducibility.
