**2.1 Salts**

*Pharmaceutical Formulation Design - Recent Practices*

provide longer stability to the formulation by proper designing and protecting drug component from environmental condition and to evaluate performance of devel-

Following the successful pharmacological screening of an active molecular entity, one has to be sure about the appropriate molecular form of active molecular entity. The optimization of molecule is needed with respect to stability of molecule under normal environmental condition or with respect to enhancing the

**4**

oped formulation.

*Outline of preformulation studies.*

**Figure 1.**

**2. Optimization of an active molecular entity**

Nearly half of the drug molecules that are marketed as drug products are administered in salt form. Converting a molecule into a salt form is perhaps the most widely used approach to significantly enhance the performance of a molecule. This improvement can be made in area such as follows:


There are several factors that are needed to be considered while selecting appropriate salt form. The main factor that determines the appropriate salt form is type of formulation that is to be developed.


• Increased patient compliance can be obtained by converting a molecule to a salt form. For instance, injection of cephalosporin generates the pain at site of application. However, when it is administered as morpholine salt, the pain at the site of application was reduced to many folds. In similar way, salt form can improve the taste adaptability by masking the taste and odor. Piperazine can be improved organolaptically by converting into salt with adipic acid [1].
