Toward Mechanistic Design of Surrogate Buffers for Dissolution Testing of pH-Dependent Drug Delivery Systems

The in vivo dissolution of enteric-coated (EC) products is often overestimated by compendial in vitro dissolution experiments. It is of great interest to mimic the in vivo conditions as closely as possible in vitro in order to predict the in vivo behavior of EC dosage forms. The reason behind this is the overly high buffering capacity of the common compendial buffers compared to the intestinal bicarbonate buffer. However, a bicarbonate-based buffer is technically difficult to handle due to the need for continuous sparging of the media with CO2 to maintain the desired buffer pH. Therefore, bicarbonate buffers are not commonly used in routine practice and a non-volatile alternative is of inte…