EUDRAGIT®

Until the 1940s, all orally administered medicines, even the most modern ones, suffered from a significant disadvantage: the release of the active ingredients in the body at the right time and in the right place could not be precisely controlled. This only changed with the development of EUDRAGIT® at Röhm & Haas, now the Evonik site in Darmstadt.

At the beginning of the 1950s, they came up with the idea of coating tablets with a plastic and thus regulating the release of the active ingredients. In 1953, the first four prototypes were developed and launched in 1954 under the EUDRAGIT® brand. Further developments followed. In addition to the existing EUDRAGIT® grades in organic solution, solvent-free solids in powder or granular form were added. In 1966, the development of prolonged-release preparations with delayed drug delivery began. This made it possible to apply a coating with solubility or permeability independent of pH values to dosage forms using EUDRAGIT®. The introduction of EUDRAGIT® aqueous polymer dispersions in 1972 was a milestone in development, as these coating processes were simpler, more versatile and more economical.

In the 1990s, transdermal therapy systems (TTS) with EUDRAGIT® polymers were launched. In this way, drugs could be absorbed by the skin via transdermal patches. This led, for example, to the development of nicotine patches which, thanks to EUDRAGIT®, continuously delivered the amount of nicotine they contained over a fixed period of time, thus alleviating the withdrawal symptoms for those who wanted to quit.

Today, Evonik's Health Care Business Line is one of the leading developers and manufacturers of functional pharmaceutical excipients for oral dosage forms (EUDRAGIT®) and parenteral depot formulations (RESOMER®).