Pierre Fabre Medicament's supercritical fluids division won the Silver Innovation Award at the CPHI International trade show (Convention on Pharmaceutical Ingredients) in October 2008 in Germany.
The technology awarded at the CPHI is known as Formulplex.
This is a supercritical CO2 medium complexation process developed by Pierre Fabre Laboratories.
It is a means of obtaining inclusion complexes under 'mild' conditions in order to increase the bio-availability of poorly soluble drugs.
Cyclodextrins, a branch of the oligosaccharides family, are commonly used to form inclusion complexes.
Complexes obtained with Formulplex have a structure showing different characteristics to that of complexes obtained using other techniques.
Thus, interactions between the active ingredient and cyclodextrins are more efficient, resulting in higher apparent solubility.
Formulplex can be carried out under mild, solvent-free conditions and helps to reduce energy costs.
Pierre Fabre has also developed other technologies founded on pressurised CO2 use.
Its Formuldisp technology leads to stable solid dispersion with increased excipient functionality.
With Formulcoat, supercritical CO2 helps to coat particles to mask their bitter taste or to stabilise an active ingredient.
The RESS and SAS crystallisation processes help to increase an active ingredient's specific surface, in order to obtain a specific polymorph or a narrow granulometric breakdown.
