A comparative study of two data-driven modeling approaches to predict drug release from ER matrix tablets

The pharmaceutical industry is striving to develop innovative and promising tools, increasingly embracing new data-driven approaches, to understand, improve and accelerate the drug product development process. While extended release (ER) oral formulations offer a number of advantages, including maintenance of therapeutic drug levels, a reduction in dosing frequency, and minimization of side effects, achieving consistent drug release profiles remains a significant challenge. As a critical attribute for drug absorption into systemic circulation, in vitro dissolution testing represents a time-consuming and complex method for the evaluation of such formulations. The main objective of this study was to develop a model for predicting drug dissolution in the quality by design (QbD)-based development of ER oral hydrophilic matrix tablets comprising polyethylene oxide (PEO). Two main modeling approaches are conducted and compared: (i) model screening to fit and compare multiple predictive machine learning (ML) models and then deploy the best model, in this case, artificial neural networks (ANN), and (ii) functional data analysis (FDA) combined with the design of experiments (DoE) that fit a smoothing model to each dissolution curve as a continuous function. A dataset comprising 91 ER matrix tablet formulations was analyzed, with the dissolution data split into training, validation, and test sets (70%, 20%, and 10%, respectively). The results demonstrated that both ANN and functional DoE (FDOE) models achieved high similarity with the experimental dissolution profiles, as indicated by f2 values ranging from 48 to 88 for the FDOE and 52 to 88 for ANN. This work highlights the potential of integrating advanced data-driven modeling techniques into ER drug development to enhance dissolution prediction accuracy and streamline the formulation process, thus reducing time and costs.