Case Studies

Successful Cooperation Yields Anti-Stick Rewards

Pfizer is the world’s largest research based Pharmaceutical company - discovering, developing, manufacturing, and marketing branded medicines. However, despite its status as an industry giant, Pfizer still has to handle the common day to day challenges of tablet compression...

Click here to download to read more

Working with Robert McBride

McBride is an established international company, with significant manufacturing operations throughout Europe, specialising in private label and contract manufacturing of laundry

Click here to download to read more

Working with GR Lanes Health Products Ltd

How would your company like to improve tooling life by 115% and increase product yield? Read on to find out how this can be achieved……

Click here to download to read more

I Holland works closely with a manufacturer of one of the world’s favourite range of multi-vitamins

In January 2008 a leading nutraceutical manufacturer was experiencing serious issues with a particularly abrasive formulation of part of their range of Vitamins.

Click here to download to read more

Working in Partnership with…Perrigo

Perrigo, the UK’s leading supplier of own label OTC medicines, nutritional supplements and herbals, has been buying tooling from I Holland for many years. More recently I Holland has become Perrigo’s sole supplier of tablet compression tooling and the two companies are now working together on new development projects as partner organisations.

Click here to download to read more

AFM Anti Sticking Research

As part of I Holland’s continuing quest to increase understanding of the science behind tabletting, their Research & Development team have completed a preliminary study in partnership with UK based contract research organisation Molecular Profiles.    

The aim of the study is to develop an atomic force microscopy (AFM) based approach to understanding why formulation can sometimes stick to tablet punch tips.  It is the intention that this will ultimately be used to understand and prevent sticking. 

Adhesive interactions were measured with an AFM probe containing a single particle of a common excipient. These adhesion forces were then measured across the surfaces of various types of I Holland’s PharmaCote tablet punches.  The adhesion force distribution can be spatially mapped to indentify ‘hot spots’ of high adhesion sites.  In addition to the surface characteristics, the relative humidity was also found to have a large influence on the adhesion to tablet punches, in one case causing a greater than 3x increase in sticking as the ambient humidity was increased. Interestingly, various PharmaCote materials showed different humidity/adhesion behaviour, which can be linked to surface hydrophilicity.

This groundbreaking work has highlighted important factors which need to be considered when evaluating adhesive interactions in tablet compression. This study has also shown how, with further research, potential sticking problems may be predicted and alleviated in the future.

Click here to download to read more