Coating Processes of Pharmaceutical Applicability: A Glimpse

Presentation of manuscript is aiming to furnish glimpse on coating processes. Coating is process of snugly covering substrate surface with coating materials (CoM). In due course coating process has gradually developed from sugar-coating to non-aqueous film-coating to aqueous film-coating to specialised-coating processes. In second half of past century sugar-coating was first choice for pharmaceutical industry. Lengthy and tedious processing along with issues of skilled-operator inherited to sugar-coating compelled them to spring-up and improve film-coating. From past five decades, volatile organic solvent (VOS) are preferred over water in film-coating. Momentum for using aqueous solvent in film-coating gets accelerated from past few decades. Nowadays these replacing the VOS based film-coating processes as later inherit issues relating toxicity; safety; worker hygiene & safety; environmental pollution; etc. During process of finding novelty of coating another exploited sphere is coating of particulate substrate surfaces with CoM is to confer them worthy functionalities and applications. In this area both wet- & dry-coating process finds applicability thru modifying and/or altering innate properties of substrate, physically and/or chemically. Dry-coating process basically comprises specialised and novel process & technologies. Nowadays there available numerous conventional, specialised, and novel coating processes. Amongst them state-of-art process are hot-melt coating (HMC) process, aqueous film-coating process, aerosolized coating process, Supercell® coating process, gas-/ vapour-phase process, photo curable coating process, electrical-electrostatic deposition process, Resonant acoustic coating process, thermal and mechanical process, thermo-mechanical process, fluidised-bed processes, etc. Herein conventional, specialised, and novel coating processes are briefed, to update professionals. Keywords: Coating, film-coating, novel, process, specialised.