How fear of large tablets simply dissolves

Good therapy can be bitter and hard to swallow. At least that’s the opinion of many patients who suffer from the metabolic disorder type 2 diabetes mellitus. That’s because well-established active ingredient metformin hydrochloride — commonly called “metformin” — is the unchallenged gold standard for treatment of type 2 diabetes in cases where the patient is not yet required to inject insulin. But the classic film-coated tablets are comparatively large and therefore hard for many patients to swallow.

Merck Serono — a pioneer in oral diabetes treatments with many years of experience in the field — has now come up with an answer to this problem. The latest stage in the development of the metformin product Glucophage®, which was originally presented around 50 years ago, is an easily water-soluble powder with an almost neutral taste. Glucophage® powder has been developed in dosage strengths of 500, 850, and 1,000 milligrams — the doses are packed in small, individual foil sachets.

This innovation has arrived at just the right time, given the growing demand for a well-tolerated and easy-to-administer drug for treatment of type 2 diabetes. The number of patients continues to rise — worldwide, a total of around six percent of all adults, or around 250 million people, suffer from types 1 and 2 diabetes. Of these patients, more than 90 percent of all diabetes cases in industrialized countries are type 2. At the same time, diabetes specialists are increasingly emphasizing how important it is to continually administer the medication in order to successfully stabilize glucose levels and prevent long-term diabetes complications. Such “therapeutic compliance” is best achieved when the patient can easily and comfortably administer the medication. And this applies especially when the medication is intended for long-term administration; in such cases patients like to be able to choose between various dosage forms.

“Three years of intensive development work have gone into this innovative drug,” says Dagmar Färber, a development expert at Merck Serono. The European market launch took place in 2009. The first step was development work on a laboratory scale. “In addition to ensuring rapid solubility of the powder, one of the greatest challenges posed by the project was the development of a largely neutral taste of the solution,” reports Färber. The developers couldn’t rely on their own sense of taste for this part of the project, because taste tests cannot be carried out on prescription drugs in the laboratory.

That’s why Merck Serono cooperated with a laboratory that has developed an “electronic tongue.” This robot analyzes active ingredients and medications with respect to various parameters that are also perceived by the tongue and nose. The electronic nose is a very important part of the system, because the human nose also plays a key role in forming people’s perceptions of taste.