Sustained Release is a new technology are in drug delivery systems, wherein a pill is administered to a patient and the dosing of the drug is controlled by the pill. This dosing has to follow a set profile. One process for developing Sustained Release drugs is by coating the pill with a non-premeable coating - one side of the pill is then drilled with a precise hole. 

Lasers are used in the pharmaceutical formulation area to provide precision drilling in pills, since lasers provide excellent precise control on the hole size, ( dia and depth ) without generating contamination. The Laser Pill Drilling Machine is a system aimed at use in the R & D departments of Pharmaceutical companies, who are developing Sustained Release Formulations.

The LPDS control system is a custom - built control system which provides the researcher the ability to manipulate the laser parameters and drill holes of different sizes. Provision for medium volume trial runs and production runs can also be done using this system.

An automatic color detection system is used to detect which side of the pill is facing up, since the pill necessarily has to be drilled from one designated side only.
 

The LPDS control system consists of :
 

Distributed control architecture
RS 485 bus architecture
3 nos. IMC-01 single axis controllers 
1 no. LCM laser control module to control the Coherent laser
1 no. SER-PLC Serial port based PLC with 24 inputs and 24 outputs
Joystick Controller
Auto-color detection system
High speed color sensor to detect the orientation of the pill 
Windows 95/NT Operating System
LPDS software
VLASER utiltiy to control the Laser Control Module

Operating System :                           Win 95/NT 
Development Platform :                    Visual Basic/Visual C++
                                                         Franklin C for the IMC-01 controllers, LCM and SER-PLC modules.

Special features :

The package is highly user friendly features including :

User features :

Simple to operate and user friendly GUI
System halts 
Complete control on laser parameters - laser power, pulse duration, pulse width
Different Pill menus enabling user to re-do trials with parameters used earlier
Simple file based parameter settings
Pills are sorted on a row by row basis
Each row can have different setting of laser parameters
High speed and low speed operation
Report Generation :   Production reports
Pill report - if any pills are wrong side up