Strategies to Overcome Challenges in Formulating Tablets from Dried Plant Extracts: a Comprehensive Review.

Traditional medicinal plant derivatives (such as infusions, decoctions, and extracts) are employed in various therapeutic applications due to their wide chemical diversity and multiple biological effects. However, their therapeutic potential is often limited by challenges in conventional pharmaceutical dosage forms, including poor solubility, stability issues, and difficulties in handling and accurate dosing. To overcome these limitations, drying and tableting emerge as viable alternatives, providing stable, cost-effective, uniform, and scalable dosage forms suitable for large-scale production. Nonetheless, factors such as high hygroscopicity, low flowability, poor compressibility, and reduced bioavailability of the complex dried mixture obtained from plant materials pose challenges for tablet formulation. Given this scenario, this review provides a comprehensive overview of these technological hurdles, and explores strategies to overcome them, including the use of excipients to improve flow, optimization of the drying process, granulation techniques, composite particles, solid dispersions, and liquisolid systems. These strategies have enabled the successful development of various types of tablets, such as immediate-release, orodispersible, mucoadhesive, chewable, and extended-release formulations. Finally, this work highlights current advances and practical applications, offering insights into future innovations in the formulation of tablets containing dried plant extracts, including approaches that could facilitate progress toward continuous manufacturing.