STUDY OF PLANTAIN POWDER AND ITS CO-PROCESSED MIXTURES AS POTENTIAL EXCIPIENTS IN FORMULATING DISPERSIBLE TABLETS

Today, researchers are more focusing towards natural excipients as they have low cost, no or less side effects and are biocompatible as compared to synthetic excipients. In present research work, various properties of plantain powder were evaluated to check its potential as disintegrant in formulating dispersible tablets. It had shown good swelling index, but poor compressibility. Partly cooked plantain powder had shown improved compressibility. The coprocessed mixtures of plantain with different diluents prepared by solvent evaporation method using alcohol as solvent had shown significant improvements in compressibility as compared to plantain powder and partly cooked plantain. When these co-processed mixtures were compressed into dispersible tablets, the tablets had shown significant results with respect to hardness, friability and disintegration time. The best co-processed excipients were found to be plantain-starch and plantain-microcrystalline cellulose prepared by using 40 % alcohol.