The taste of a medicine has important implications for patient acceptance and compliance. Therefore, formulation scientists use flavorings and taste-masking technologies to improve the palatability of APIs. Human tasting panels for assessing different formulations present a number of issues, so how can medicine manufacturers ensure their products taste nice?
In this article published in Drug Development & Delivery (April 2017 Vol17 No 3), Dr Detlev Haack (Director Research and Development at HERMES PHARMA), discusses:
- Why taste matters when it comes to pharmaceutical development
- The ethical concerns with using human panels to assess medicine taste
- How electronic tongues are a promising alternative for taste testing, producing reliable, non-subjective data for comparing formulation profiles, while also reducing development times and costs