ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the applications of nuclear medicine techniques to the development of pharmaceutical formulations that have taken place at Nottingham and elsewhere. A good example of this is the labelling of food in order to follow the process of gastric emptying of a drug that is released rapidy from its delivery system into the stomach and then empties into the intestine under nominal physiological control. The technique of oesophageal scintigraphy has been developed as a non-invasive test for following the oesophageal transit of food and pharmaceutical formulations, particularly capsules. In man, the disintegration and gastric emptying characteristics of capsules and tablets has been described by Hunter et al using materials labelled with 99m-technetium, bound to ion-exchange resins. Encouraged by our studies on gastric emptying we embarked on a detailed series of studies on the full gastrointestinal transit of different pharmaceutical formulations that have included a simple solution, different types of controlled release pellets, osmotic devices and non-distintegrating matrix tablets.
