Acoustic spectral analysis on inhalated lactose using UA-AFM

Acoustic Spectral Analysis on Lactose for inhaled formulation using UA-AFM

Cedric Thomas¹, N. Pocholle¹, E. Bourillot¹, L. Kerriou², V. Gamerre², E. Lesniewska¹

¹ICB UMR CNRS 6303, Univ. Bourgogne Franche-Comté, Dijon, France

²Armor Pharma, Armor Proteines SAS, Saint Brice-en-Cogles, France

Summary

The understanding of interactions in formulations is a major issue in the pharmaceutical industry. It is essential to understand the surfaces of excipients and active ingredients as well as their interactions in order to improve the stability, the reproducibility, the physico-chemical properties and the quality of lactose-based carrier particle-drug product mixtures. Identification of contaminants inside and on surface of excipients used in the pharmaceutical industry with non-destructive techniques is a challenging procedure. We propose coupling ultrasound acoustic investigation with atomic force microscopy for tomographic reconstruction. The new version of our prototype makes it possible to perform acoustic spectral analyses of the pharmaceutical lactose particles surface in order to identify non-detectable contaminants by conventional techniques (IR, XPS, EDX, UV…). The acoustic microscopy technique (1-20 MHz) operates in the attenuated total reflectance (ATR) configuration and is sensitive to the local density variation. A home-built platform was used to detect the variation of density properties of material in the bulk at specified depth of investigation by varying the ultrasound acoustic frequencies.