Engineered-inhaled particles: influence of carbohydrates excipients nature on powder properties and behavior

Pulmonary drug administration has long been used for local
or systemic treatment due to several advantages. Dry powder
inhalers (DPI) emerge as the most promising due to
efficiency, ecologic, and drug stability concerns. Coarse
lactose-carrier is still the gold standard when inhalation
powders are developed. Despite some efforts to produce new
types of powders, the lung drug deposition is still poorly
controlled which will ultimately impact therapeutic
effectiveness. The goal of this study is to develop an inhaled
powder leading to a deep and uniform deposition of 2
different active pharmaceutical ingredients (API).
We developed “engineered-inhalation powders” using the
spray-drying technique. Multiple carbohydrates excipients
were binary mixed and combined with two active
pharmaceutical ingredients for asthma therapy (budesonide
and formoterol). Particle morphology was characterized by
the number and the depth of dimples, measured from SEM
images. We define a new characteristic deflation ratio ξ as
the product between the number of dimples and their depth.
Six different powders having opposite morphologies have
been selected and we have demonstrated a linear correlation
between the fine particle fraction (FPF) and the deflation
ratio of produced powders.