OSD
Overcoming key challenges in the OSD market
Oral solid dosage (OSD) forms remain a key priority across the pharmaceutical market, largely driven by their patient convenience benefits, including ease of administration, as well as additional shelf-life advantages.
However, the market landscape is changing and OSD developers must evolve their formulations to keep up. Here are three key challenges that are changing the OSD landscape that pharmaceutical companies must consider.
- Meeting patient demands for greater convenience - To keep pace in a highly competitive market, drug developers must focus on offering more convenient drug products to meet evolving patient demands. This includes optimising the texture, shape, taste, and size of OSD products to improve patient adherence for those who may struggle to swallow tablets.
- The rise of biopharma treatments - Traditionally, biologics have required parenteral administration, due to the fact these formulations can be easily degraded in the GI tract. However, recent advancements are making oral biologics more viable, offering patients self-administered options while reducing the burden on healthcare providers. However, new formulations, production processes, and solutions are needed to effectively address more bioavailability and stability challenges.
- The focus on rare disease treatments - The rapid growth in the number of development projects for rare disease treatments presents challenges for drug developers due to the inherent requirement of these therapies for small-batch manufacturing. To make these treatments financially viable, new approaches such as 3D printing of OSD forms are being considered for cost-effective small-batch production.
Harnessing the expertise and capabilities of outsourcing partners, or contract development and manufacturing organisations (CDMOs) is key to helping pharmaceutical companies overcome these challenges. This means that CDMOs must be able to offer the oral solid dosage capabilities and expertise their partners need to navigate the challenges they face.
In a recent interview with Pharmaceutical Outsourcing, Dr Uwe Hanenberg, Head of Product Development, Oral Solid Dose at Recipharm shared his insights into the OSD space and discussed how pharmaceutical companies can achieve success.