(528e) Tablet Manufacturing Using Dried Whole Puerto Rican Sweet Potato and Breadfruit Particles

In Puerto Rico, there is a serious need to develop alternatives for effective recovery after a catastrophic event, including the strong dependance of importation of products and storage facilities. One industry that has constantly being affected has been the pharmaceutical industry since most of its raw ingredients for manufacture comes from foreign industries. An alternative is to encourage the production of these ingredients using local resources as a source. An area of opportunity withing these ingredients is the development of novel ingredients. In fact, current FDA approaches are aimed at promoting new formulations using novel excipients that had bast experience in other industries, have a positive functional effect on the patient, and can promote the creation of new drugs.

Local crops harvested locally can be a source for these novel ingredients, which although historically have been widely used for starch extraction, there is a lack of information on using the whole food components for drug formulation. This research focused on the use of dried whole-food particles obtained from local sweet potato and breadfruit in the preparation of food-based tablets. For this, the effect of varying the type of raw material (sweet potato and breadfruit), the method of cutting the raw material (cubes and chips), the addition of a binder to the formulation (0% and 2% PVP), and different compression forces (4, 6, and 8 metric tons) were studied to understand the effect on the tablet overall performance using common characterizations methods for tablet manufacture. To understand the correlation between the variables and the results, analysis between results were done using Fisher analysis. General results showed that the compression force and agglomerate percentage had is significant effect on the tablets friability and hardness while the material composition, the method of cutting, the compression force, and the agglomerate percentage all had a significant effect on the disintegration time. For the friability test, only the sweet potato tablets with 2 % of PVP reached values below the 1% of weight loss. For the tablet hardness, most of the tablets had hardness greater than 4kP except for the case tablets compressed at 4MT with 0% PVP and whose raw materials were cut into chips. Mean disintegration times for sweet potato ranged from 7 to 18 minutes while breadfruit tablets took 3 to 5 minutes to disintegrate. Dissolution profiles had the expected behavior of a constant increasement in concentration until it reached concentration equilibrium before 15 minutes. These results shows that it is feasible to compact these whole foods particles and can be later studied for future formulations. Next steps are to improve the particle properties with minimal physical modifications and study the mixture between different foods. Now, the findings of this research can promote more investigation these particles and provide a product which can, in addition to being used in other applications in the food industry for example, can be used as a novel excipient that can reduce import and transportation costs, minimize storage dependency, and even as an emergency food source.