Any animal owner or veterinarian knows the stress of attempting to persuade a pet to take their medicine.

Bitter-tasting or oddly textured tablets are swiftly rejected, medicine dosed into food is only partially consumed, and some pets — elderly animals, those with dental conditions, or species such as cats — can struggle to chew brittle oral tablets.

If you’re thinking that there must be a better way — there is.

Read on to explore more about innovative soft chew technology, or download Argenta^®’s associated eBook and fact sheet today to dig deeper.

Introducing soft chew technology

Chewable tablets are nothing new in the veterinary industry. Such tablets are often used to deliver a range of active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) to companion animals. These tablets are chewed or crushed in the mouth before being swallowed, and are appropriate for a range of animal species.

However, many of the standard chews available are not ‘true’ chews, instead remaining relatively hard, brittle, and unpalatable. But innovative soft chewable solutions have emerged to offer a flexible dosing alternative — one that overcomes the various challenges of their brittle alternatives.

But what makes soft chews so special?

Soft chews offer many benefits for veterinarians, animal owners, and veterinary medicine developers alike.

1. Better taste, better texture
   Unlike harder chewable tablets, soft chewable technology brings a wide range of superior options for taste and texture, meaning that soft chews can be made far more appealing and palatable to their target animal. As they are more likely to be compliantly consumed by companion animals, tasty, treat-textured soft chews enable easier and less stressful at-home oral dosing of APIs for many species, in turn driving greater compliance and better treatment outcomes.
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2. API flexibility
   Soft chews can accommodate most APIs, which can be added to the chews in either solid or liquid form. And since soft chews are easily chewable, they can be fairly large while still being accepted by animals, enabling developers to deliver higher API doses per chew. This enables fewer applications for the same therapeutic impact.
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3. Tailored dissolution
   Developers can tailor the dissolution profile of soft chews using different excipients, producing soft chews with immediate- or sustained-release profiles to suit their needs. Soft chews can deliver medicine as needed whether they are chewed extensively or swallowed intact, and developers can enhance bioavailability using additional ingredients as required.

Towards ‘true’ chews: No easy task

So it’s clear that soft chew products can readily serve the needs of animals and their owners or veterinarians — but it’s not easy to create a stable and palatable soft chew.

Several areas throw up difficulties for developers:

Formulation

To create a soft chew with the right properties, developers must carefully formulate a complex mix of ingredients, identify suitable stabilisers and plasticisers, and add the right amount of lipids for superior taste masking. This must be done without compromising API stability, product release profile, or characteristics such as API solubility. Balancing these, and other, trade-offs is a challenging task that can be tricky to do in-house, and can lead to a complex, lengthy, and costly development process.

Water content

Water is a key component of texture, bringing a pleasant mouthfeel, juiciness, and softness. But when used in pharmaceutical products, water can be a source of issues: it can compromise the long-term stability of the API and texture of the product, and promote microbial growth when products are stored. To avoid this, developers must understand how to produce soft chews with minimal water content while retaining a pleasant sensory experience for the target animal.

Palatability

To maximise the chances of a chew being appealing to the target animal — essential for compliance — developers must consider the odours, flavours, textures, and mouthfeel that would be desirable for that species, while also ensuring these properties are tailored to the API. This is no easy task. It requires high levels of technical awareness, a deep understanding of soft chew products, and can involve copious trial and error. Additionally, there is no universal solution, as what works for one API or animal may not work for another.

Alongside these development challenges, there are many hurdles involved in actually producing soft chews and subsequently getting them approved by regulators. We explore these in depth, and dig deeper into the aspects mentioned above, in our soft chew eBook.

The best way forward?

It’s clear that there is much to consider at every step of the soft chew development process, and developers face a whole host of potential R&D, regulatory, and manufacturing challenges. Without the right expertise and experience a lot can go wrong, causing costly delays and amendments.

So how can companies effectively avoid and overcome these challenges? How can they improve their chances of successfully developing an innovative soft chew product — and gain access to the specialised knowledge, tools, technology, and regulatory expertise they may lack in-house?

We discuss this at length in our free eBook, ‘Developing a palatable and effective soft chew for companion animal medicine’. The eBook delves further into the benefits and challenges of soft chews and discusses the solutions to developing true soft chew technology and submitting it for regulatory approval. Additionally, if you’re interested in licensing a soft chew delivery platform, we have a fact sheet available on Argenta’s soft chew technology, with details on palatability, texture, dissolution profile, stability, and more.

Learn more about true soft chew technology and download the eBook and fact sheet today.