FORMULATION AND EVALUATION OF NON EFFERVESCENT FLOATING TABLETS OF CEFUROXIME AXETIL

The objective of this work was to develop non effervescent floating tablets by Melt granulation technique. Cefuroxime axetil is having shorter half life of 80 min and hydrolyzed by intestinal esterase to the non absorbable cefuroxime in the gut lumen and is, therefore, suspected as a possible cause of incomplete bioavailability. So there is a need to increase the gastric residence time of the drug. These tablets were prepared by different meltable binders such as paraffin wax, bees wax and carnauba wax as release retardants. Various formulations have been developed by varying concentration of waxes, buoyancing agent and disintegrating agent. The FTIR spectrum indicated the stability and compatability of drug and excipients. All the formulations (F1 to F9) were evaluated for weight variation, hardness, friability, buoyancy studies and In-vitro drug release studies. Among all the formulations, dissolution studies data indicated that F9 formulation exhibited good drug release 0f 91.67% and has shown floating time more than 24hrs with a lag time of 30 min. The mechanism of drug release of NEF tablets of Cefuroxime Axetil was determined by the application of Korsmeyer-Peppas model, Higuchi's model, Zero order and first order kinetics. From the drug release plots it was observed that the drug release was following zero order kinetics and non - fickian diffusion (n value 0.5 to 1) fitting in to Korsmeyer-Peppas equation. This indicates that drug release depends on erosion of waxes.