ABSTRACT:
Oral route is presented as the gold standard of drug delivery systems within the pharmaceutical industry being the most safe, non-invasive and the most economic route of administration. This in return elevates the patient compliance and adherence to the treatment as being approved as the most convenient drug delivery system. However, a special section of patients such as geriatrics, pediatrics, disabled and mentally-ill patients find some difficulties in handling conventional oral dosage forms like tablets and capsules. For example, elderly patients usually suffer from weak shaking hands, difficulty in swallowing and inability to drink water properly which make dealing with conventional oral dosage forms a hard mission. Also, another major section of patients can hardly use the oral conventional dosage forms as a result of sudden allergic attacks, motion sickness, nauseous, uncooperative patients and also travellers who might not have an easy water access. Moreover, oral drug delivery is usually incomplete if the drug is exposed to hepatic first pass effect, which in turn lowers the bioavailability of many drugs. Consequently, advancement in oral drug delivery systems provided a vast number of technologies including the production of orodispersible tablets (ODTs). Over many decades, these systems offered a successful alternative to conventional oral drug delivery systems. Since their production to the pharmaceutical market in the 1980s, they became one of the rapidly growing industrial channels. Many technologies including conventional and patented ones adopted the production of ODTs. In this article, several core aspects are discussed including the history of ODTs development, their advantages, disadvantages, techniques and patented technologies used in their preparation, also, methods of evaluation and future challenges of ODTs.