| Summary: | Multiple dose regimens are frequently required to optimize therapy; however, such therapy is frequently undermined by poor patient adherence. In fact, patient adherence is inversely related to the number of doses a patient is asked to take each drug. Consequently, great efforts are under way to develop drug delivery systems that are able to release drugs over an extended time interval; this could offer considerable benefits including reducing administration frequency. This dissertation describes multiple dose platforms designed to deliver a variety of drugs as a single oral administration are described in this dissertation. We believe these drug delivery systems can be used to enhance patient compliance and achieve better therapeutic outcomes. We developed and tested a novel gastroretentive pulsatile drug delivery platform. This platform could deliver multiple unit doses of a drug in a pulsatile pattern and be controlled by dissolution/erosion of a lag-time interval layer. The platform was designed to be retained in the stomach whilst pulsing drug at various timed intervals. This would allow each dose of the drug to release above or within an optimized absorption window over an extended period of time. To assure the robustness and reproducibility of the platform, various in vitro dissolution studies and physical stability tests were performed and evaluated through drug release characteristics, buoyancy, and structural integrity evaluations. The applicability of the novel multiple dose platform was demonstrated by providing repeated release profiles of ciprofloxacin and verapamil in a single, once-daily delivery system. Ultimately, this dissertation demonstrates that a novel multiple dose platform could be a suitable alternative dosing strategy for a variety of drugs to improve patient adherence and treatment efficacy. === text
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