Designing, building, and testing the spin, strip, and stomp mechanism for pharmaceutical tableting

Abstract

Nanofiber fabrication of pharmaceutical pills creates significant advantages over conventional techniques such as shorter pill dissolution times, airborne drug particulate matter elimination, and shorter liquid drying time, among many others. Therefore, the Novartis MIT Center for Continuous Manufacturing is prioritizing development of electrospinning techniques for producing nanofibrous pills. However, electrospinning pills still has a very low production rate compared to that of the current pharmaceutical techniques. Motivated by the need for an efficient and effective elecrospinning technique, we developed the "Spin, Strip, and Stomp Mechanism." This technique has successfully made pills of the required quality, designed with the goal of reducing the gap between the low production rates of nanofibrous pills and the high rates of the current pill making techniques.