A moving-boundary model of dissolution from binary drug-excipient granules incorporating microstructure

Accurate mechanistic in vitro dissolution models can deliver insight into drug release behaviour and guide formulation development. Drug release profiles from drug-excipient granules can be impacted by variation of porosity and drug load within granules, which may arise from inherent variability in granulation processes. Here, we analyse and validate a recent model of drug release from a single spherical granule with a matrix of insoluble excipient, incorporating radial variation of porosity and drug load. The model is presented and specialised to the case where the initial drug load is large compared to the capacity of the granule's pores at solubility. In this limit, the model reduces to a single ordinary differential equation describing depletion of a shrinking, drug-saturated core. Model validation is performed using drug release data from the literature for a granule system consisting of acetaminophen and microcrystalline cellulose. A new extended model to describe dissolution from a polydisperse collection of granules is derived. The performance is compared to single particle models using equivalent spherical diameters. The developed model provides a new tool to explore the dissolution parameter space for these systems and for considering the impact of radial variation of granule porosity and drug load arising from manufacturing processes.