Sharp Clinical Services has increased capacity to fill capsules for the pharmaceutical industry with the acquisition of MG America’s Planeta 50 continuous capsule filling machine. The Planeta 50 has the capability to fill capsules with powder, pellets, tablets or micro-tablets at a rate of up to 50,000 capsules per hour as well as offering an in-process weight control system.
 
With the addition, Sharp can now fill capsules ranging from a few hundred capsules for preclinical or early Phase I studies, to hundreds of thousands of capsules for larger scale Phase III studies and beyond.
 
Dr. Frank Santillo, senior director of research at Sharp Clinical Services said, “The Planeta provides a radical change to the way we can produce capsule products for our customers. There are two features that distinguish the Planeta from the other encapsulation machines – an in-process weight control system and a Universal Tablet Feeder. These two features are uniquely important for capsule production in the clinical phases.”
 
Dr. Santillo added, “Traditional approaches to overencapsulation production are either manual or machine produced (typically requiring tooling for each tablet shape involved in a study). Tooling costs can be significant and more critically, the delivery time for tooling from the vendor can be as long as nine weeks. The Planeta that we purchased has a Universal Tablet Feeding Unit.  For a given capsule size, the Universal Tablet Feeder allows any shape tablet to be dosed in a given capsule size, thus eliminating the cost of custom tooling to the customer and the more importantly, eliminating the delay.”