Drug repositioning, also known as drug repurposing, reprofiling, or rediscovery, is considered to be one of the most promising strategies to accelerate the development of new original drug products. Multiple examples of successful rediscovery or therapeutic switching of old molecules that did not show clinical benefits or safety in initial trials encourage the following of the discovery of new therapeutic pathways for them. This review summarizes the efforts that have been made, mostly over the last decade, to identify new therapeutic targets for celecoxib. To achieve this goal, records gathered in MEDLINE PubMed and Scopus databases along with the registry of clinical trials by the US National Library of Medicine at the U.S. National Institutes of Health were explored. Since celecoxib is a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug that represents the class of selective COX-2 inhibitors (coxibs), its clinical potential in metronomic cancer therapy, the treatment of mental disorders, or infectious diseases has been discussed. In the end, the perspective of a formulator, facing various challenges related to unfavorable physicochemical properties of celecoxib upon the development of new oral dosage forms, long-acting injectables, and topical formulations, including the latest trends in the pharmaceutical technology, such as the application of mesoporous carriers, biodegradable microparticles, lipid-based nanosystems, or spanlastics, was presented.

In this review, benefits and drawbacks of the process of spray drying and nano spray drying with regard to the manufacturing of polymeric particles for pharmaceutical applications are discussed. Spray drying has been used for many years in the food, chemical and pharmaceutical industries for converting liquids into solids, in order to form products of uniform appearance. The construction of spray dryer enables to atomize the liquid into small droplets, which ensures a large surface area for heat and mass transfer, and significantly shortens the processing. Each droplet dries to an individual solid microparticle of characteristic features that can be tailored by optimizing formulation variables and critical process parameters. Since spray drying technology is easy to scale up and can be used for drying almost any drug in a solution or suspension, there are numerous examples of products in clinical use, in which this process has been successfully applied to improve drug stability, enhance bioavailability or control its release rate. In recent years, nano spray drying technology has been proposed as a method for lab-scale manufacturing of nanoparticles. Such an approach is of particular interest at early stages of drug development, when a small amount of new chemical entities is available. Here, the nebulization technique is used for feed atomization, while laminar gas flow in the drying chamber ensures gentle drying conditions. Moreover, electrostatic collectors have gradually replaced cyclone separators, ensuring high effectiveness in producing solid nanoparticles, even if a small volume of the sample is processed.

The compendial method of evaluation of orodispersible tablets (ODT) is the same disintegration test as for conventional tablets. Since it does not reflect the disintegration process in the oral cavity, alternative methods are proposed that are more related to in vivo conditions, e.g. modified dissolution paddle apparatus, texture analyzer, rotating shaft apparatus, CCD camera application, or wetting time and water absorption ratio measurement. In this study, three different co-processed excipients for direct compression of orally disintegrating tablets were compared (Ludiflash, Pharmaburst, F-Melt). The properties of the prepared tablets such as tensile strength, friability, wetting time and water absorption ratio were evaluated. Disintegration time was measured using the pharmacopoeial method and the novel apparatus constructed by the authors. The apparatus was based on the idea of Narazaki et al., however it has been modified. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) was applied for the analysis of the disintegration mechanism of prepared tablets. The research has shown the significant effect of excipients, compression force, temperature, volume and kind of medium on the disintegration process. The novel apparatus features better correlation of disintegration time with in vivo results (R² = 0.9999) than the compendial method (R² = 0.5788), and presents additional information on the disintegration process, e.g. swelling properties.

The influence of alkaline and the neutral grade of magnesium aluminometasilicate as a porous solid carrier for the liquid self-emulsifying formulation with ibuprofen is investigated. Ibuprofen is...