The Taste of Commercially Available Clarithromycin Oral Pharmaceutical Suspensions in the Palestinian Market: Electronic Tongue and In Vivo Evaluation

Abstract

Background: The taste of oral liquid dosage forms is a crucial factor that impacts paediatric patient compliance. The electronic tongue (ET) is an emerging tool that could be useful in taste assessment in order to minimize the involvement of humans in such evaluations. Purpose: The aim of this study is to evaluate the taste of commercially available clarithromycin (CM) oral pharmaceutical suspensions in the Palestinian market. Method: Commercially available CM suspensions (the brand Klacid® and two generic K1 and K2) were assayed using the high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) method. Then, the taste of these products was assessed using alpha-astree ET. In addition, an in vivo taste assessment was conducted on paediatric patients by a hedonic panel test. Moreover, volunteering community pharmacists were asked to rank the taste of these three products according to their experience from the best to the worst. Results: All suspension products had a CM concentration not less than 98% of the label amount. The ET results coupled with the principal component analysis (PCA) showed a very clear discrimination of the samples with different distances between groups (p-values < 0.001). Suspensions were in the following order in terms of taste: Klacid® > K1 > K2. Moreover, The pattern discrimination index between (K1 and Klacid®), (K1 and K2) and (Klacid® and K2) were 8.81%, 65.75%, and 71.94%, respectively which suggests that K1 and Klacid® are the most similar preparations in terms of taste. Interestingly, these results were in excellent agreement with the pharmacist ranking and patient acceptance test. Conclusions: The evaluated preparations showed significantly different taste within the order of Klacid® > K1 > K2, as suggested by both the ET and in vivo results. Moreover, our results confirm the capability of alpha-astree ET in the taste assessment of oral suspensions and in predicting volunteer responses, which highlights its beneficial use as an in vitro taste assessment tool and as an alternative to human-based taste evaluations.

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“…In fact, the ET has been used with success in many applications as in the detection of adulation of oils, for example in a study by Bougrini et al, ET was able to discriminate and classify the argan oil adulterated with different proportions of sunflower oil,11 ET has been tested for monitoring quality of foods as milk, taste sensor was capable to discriminate reliably between fresh and spoiled milk and to follow the deterioration of the milk quality when it was stored at room temperature based on PCA17 and taste of pharmaceutical products as it can be used in taste masking of products,18 or differentiation between the taste of different products 7. In the medical field, ET has been tried to test different biological fluids as urine, serum, and sweat;18 detection of urinary system dysfunctions and creatinine levels in urine was possible using ET, in one study, the creatinine contents in 51 urine specimens evaluated by ET were compared with those obtained by automated Jaffe’s method and GC-MS showed a satisfying agreement for both methods 19.…”

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“…( 2022 ) extensively reviewed the application of MVDA in various food analyses for classification or prediction (Buvé et al., 2022 ), spanning diverse items such as cheese, sea cucumber, potato, strawberry jam, cereal flour, milk, fruit, and vegetables. MVDA has also been instrumental in revealing sensor data in several food applications (Abu‐Khalaf, 2021 ; Abu‐Khalaf et al., 2018 ; Najjar & Abu‐Khalaf, 2021 ).…”

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“…But for the drug with narrow therapeutic index the human penalists is not suitable so electronic tongue is preferred. The electric tongue is equipped with a taste sensing system having sensors for various taste signals such as umami, saltiness, astringency, bitterness and sourness [120,121]. The Insent taste sensing system SA402B was used equipped with 7 sensors of various taste stimuli has been found to be one of promising tool for taste evaluation of complex products [122,123].…”