A STRATEGIC FORMULATION AND EVALUATION OF PATCHES FOR DILTIAZEM HYDROCHLORIDE & ATENOLOL USED IN RDDS

Transdermal drug delivery systems are becoming more popular in the field of modern pharmaceutics because it has many advantages over traditional drug delivery system and mostly used to overcome the problems associated with conventional delivery system of drugs. it is self-contained, non-invasive, painless, userfriendly and discrete dosage form. The main objective of transdermal drug delivery system is to deliver drugs into targeted organ or parts through skin at predetermined rate with minimal inter and intra patient variation. The present study was carried out to develop transdermal patches of atenolol with different ratio of EVA 40% copolymer, EC (ethyl cellulose) and ERS by solvent casting method. DEP (2%) is used as a plasticizer and Span 80 as permeation enhancer. The identification of drug and the possible drug polymer interactions were studied by FTIR spectroscopy. Formulated transdermal patches were evaluated with regard to physicochemical characteristics (thickness, folding endurance etc.) and In-vitro permeation studies were performed using Franz diffusion cell. The data obtained from invitro permeation studies was treated by various conventional mathematical models (zero order, first order, Higuchi and Korsmeyerpeppa’s) to determine the release mechanism from the transdermal patches formulations. Selection of a suitable release model was based on the values of R2 (correlation coefficient), k (release constant) obtained from the curve fitting of release data. It was found that all the formulations follow the first order kinetics. The regression coefficients (R2 ) for the all formulations F1 to F4 of Higuchi plot was found to be almost linear.