Universal wet-milling technique to prepare oral nanosuspension focused on discovery and preclinical animal studies - Development of particle design

Simple and easy methods to prepare oral nanosuspension of a poorly water-soluble pharmaceutical candidate compound, called a candidate, have been developed to support the discovery and preclinical studies using animals. The different wet-milling processes in miniature, middle and large preparation scales have been established in order to cover the various types of studies with wide scale. The powder of phenytoin, a poorly water-soluble model drug candidate, was suspended in the aqueous medium, in which the appropriate dispersing agents were dissolved, and milled by agitating together with small hard beads made of zirconia. Three general-purpose equipments with stirring, oscillating and turbulent motions were applied instead of the specific milling machine with high power to avoid much investment at such early development stage. The operational condition and dispersing agents were optimized to obtain finer particles using the middle-scaled oscillating beads-milling apparatus in particular. It was found that the nanosuspension, which whole particle distribution was in the submicron range, was successfully produced within the running time around 10 min. By applying the newly developed dispersing medium, the nanoparticles with identical size distribution were also prepared using the stirring and turbulent methods on miniature and large scales, respectively; indicating only 50 mg to 30g or more amount of candidate could be milled to nanosuspension using three equipments. The crystalline analysis indicated that the both crystal form and crystallinity of the original bulk drug completely remained after wet-milling process. The results demonstrated that the wet-milling methods developed in this research would be a fundamental technique to produce nanosuspension for poorly water-soluble and oral absorbable drug candidates. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.