DESIGN AND EVALUATION OF DRUG RELEASE KINETICS OF MELOXICAM SUSTAINED RELEASE MATRIX TABLETS

Objective: Meloxicam, a potent non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug which has short half-life, makes the development of sustained release (SR) forms extremely advantageous. The main objective of this work is formulation development of Meloxicam sustained release matrix tablets that provide complete drug release that starts in the stomach to rapidly alleviate the painful symptoms and continues in the intestine to maintain analgesic effect and to understand the kinetics of drug release by applying mathematical and model-dependent approaches. Methods: Various formulations were developed by using release rate controlling and gel forming polymers like HPMC (K4M, K15M, K100M) by direct compression method. The in-vitro drug release was studied 7.4 pH phosphate buffer using USP dissolution Apparatus 2 at 100 rpm. Zeroorder, first-order, Higuchi, Hixson-Crowell and Korsmeyer et al. models were used to estimate the kinetics of drug release. Results: It was concluded that the release followed zero order kinetics, as the correlation coefficient (R2 value) was higher for zero order release, so the drug release mechanism is controlled release.