Application of NIR reflectance spectroscopy for the identification of pharmaceutical excipients Original Research Article

For manufacturing of medicaments, all ingredients must be reliably identified. Wet chemistry methods for identification of cellulose ethers, used by the Pharmacopoea Europea, is time consuming and expensive. To distinguish microcristalline and powdered cellulose, only unspecific sedimentation properties are used. However, applications as well as technological and pharmacokinetic properties of cellulose and various cellulose ethers are different. NIR reflectance spectroscopy speeds up the identification of excipients. So this technique causes fewer delay in manufacturing processes. The discrimination of powdered and microcristalline celluloses as well as cellulose and cellulose ethers is made possible by factor analysis and soft independent modelling of class analogies (SIMCA). The classification was improved by spectral pretreatment multiplicative scatter correction (MSC), derivation and wavelength selection. The discrimination of powdered and microcristalline celluloses is statistically highly significant, so the identification can be done reliably. Cellulose ethers can be quickly identified by NIR spectroscopy, although a large number of samples of different manufacturers and physical properties, for example viscosity, were used. The only exception is the discrimination of methylcellulose and cellulose ethers containing methyl and hydroxyalkyl substituents, which show identical spectra. But even for those excipients, the wet chemistry expenses can be reduced to one test. The developed strategy for data evaluation is quite general in nature, hence it can be applied to other pharmaceutical powders, excipients and active components as well.