Active Pharmaceutical Ingredient is a substance that considered as one of the important materials that enter into the manufacture of the final pharmaceutical product, and its activity. Pharmaceuticals have a significant impact on the treatment and diagnosis of pathological conditions, and thus reduce the economic burden of the disease. As well, it has a role in the restoration, correction, or modification of physiological functions in human. Excipients play an important role in a drug's performance, including bioavailability, improving solubility, preserving the PH, stability, and determining the profile of the release. The reduction in the production cost of active pharmaceutical ingredient is not only due to the reduction in workers' wages, beside to innovations in the production method, which could help to reduce the economic state. The excipients have an essential part in industry of drugs, which contain a dependable, repeatable production method that produces a more stable product over time and increasing patient compliance.
Floating Drug Delivery Systems (FDDS) is a very recent approach in the development of oral drug delivery systems, which can be employed to control the gastric emptying time of filled device for both sustained and controlled release (CR) preparations, to locate the CR in a particular site, to minimize the drug loss and to improve drug delivery. These types of systems have a low density, are buoyant in gastric fluid, maintain longer residence time in the stomach with controlled drug release. FDDS can be prepared in tablets, capsules, powders, granules, films and microspheres and are especially valuable when dealing with highly water-soluble drugs with short halflife, having absorption window low in the gut or having instability at intestinal pH. There are several types of FDDS such as effervescent, non-effervescent, raft-forming, the hydrodynamically balanced and the inflatable system that uses different ways to float and consequent modification of release. Their performance is highly dependent upon physiological parameters, such as gastric pH, motility, meal content, age, and body position. FDDS have various advantages such as increased bioavailability, rapid onset of action, a lower frequency of dose administration, better patient compliance, and long site-specific action in the stomach, which is useful in the case of gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) and peptic ulcers. Nevertheless, gastric emptying variability and complexity of the formulation still pose obstacles. Newer excipients and polymers and newer carriers will continue to improve these systems, making FDDS a potential weapon for future gastroprotective and controlled-release therapies.