Welcome to SDM

Welcome to SDM! There is a door in the SDM laboratory. It divides the rooms used for liquid preparations from the rooms used for solids. Its is to prevent contamination from either side. There is a sensor about knee high that detects if your standing there but you have to be carefull because the sensor sometimes sends the signal slower than the door closes!

These are a couple of the girls with whom Renée and I work. On the left is Natalia and in the middle is Elisabet. Everyone here is very friendly and helpfull! Most of the people here are about our age and are either still in school or are newly out and working in the laboratory.

Renée and I have been learning to use a lot of the equpiment in SDM. This is a tablet compressor or ¨Comprimidora¨. We use it to test how hard we can make a tablet. It is really difficult to get the proper parameters needed especially when you are manually filling the matrix (the hole where the powder goes). The weight is the hardest thing to control especially when the powder does not flow well. We always feel like mechanics when we use the comprimidora because you need to use a few different wrenches to put the machine together and to adjust anything.

We preform other tests on our samples. Here Renée is by the higroscopy test. We put the powder on a watch glass and let it sit in high humidity conditions for 24 hours. We then weigh the powder and see how much water it absorbed. A good formulation absorbs less than 3%. In spain they call a watch glass a vidrio de reloj. Reloj can be translated to clock in english. When we first used this our mentor Josep called it a clock glass and we thought it was funny. I am sure that we do the same thing or worse when we try and speak to them in spanish.

In the afternoons we work with Albert on his projects. He has two major projects and with one of them we were helping him with Quality Assurance. Here Renée is testing the speed of dissolution. It is very tricky because the tablets all start disolving at the same time.

Another test we preformed was done to test stablility. We crushed the tablet and put it in a machine that exposed the powder to extreme heat for 15 minutes. We then weighed the powder and looked to see how much water was lost. A good formulation should not lose more then 3% of its water.

The machine I am using is used to test the friability of the tablets to see if they will be durable enough to withstand coating and normal wear and tear of processing. Renée is testing the hardeness or ¨duresa¨of the tablets to make sure that the tablets in each batch have similar hardnesses. The hardness is also important for the speed of dissolution.

Over all we are gaining a lot of knowledge about the industry side of pharmacy. We appreciate how much work goes into formulating tablets. It takes a lot of time and effort to prepare a tablet with the best parameters.