Solventless coating for Tablets: An alternative to conventional coating technique

There are many ways to coat tablets. Coatings are a very important part in the formulation of pharmaceutical dosage form to achieve excellent formulation quality (e.g., color, texture, mouth feel, and taste masking), physical and chemical protection for the drugs in the dosage forms, and modification of drug release characteristics. Most film coatings are applied as aqueous or organic-based polymer solutions. Such film coating brings their own disadvantages. Solventless coatings are alternative technique of coating. Solventless coating technologies can overcome many of the disadvantages associated with the use of solvents (e.g., solvent exposure, solvent disposal, and residual solvent in product) in pharmaceutical coating. Solventless processing reduces the overall cost by eliminating the tedious and expensive processes of solvent disposal/treatment. In addition, it can significantly reduce the processing time due to reduction of step of drying/evaporation. These environment-friendly processes are performed without any heat in most cases (except hot-melt coating) and thus can provide an alternative technology to coat temperature-sensitive drugs. This review includes various solventless coating methods like magnetic assisted impaction coating , hotmelt coating, supercritical fluid spray coating, electrostatic coating, dry powder coating, and photocurable coating that can be used to coat the pharmaceutical dosage forms.