|
Medicine will play the most important role especially after the practice of health insurance program for everyone in Taiwan which is estimated to reach six hundred millions NT dollars in 1995. With this tremendous market potential, the Pharmaceutical industry should strive to improve its quality and manufacturing process to the level of the developed country especially in the active ingredient-medicine to become the suppliers in this highly speciallized field. This artical deals with the process studies on the widely used cough medicine "Guaifenesin". Of the processes investigated ,the combination of guaiacol with glycidol yielded 91.1% and the combination of guaiacol salt with chlorohydrin yielded 89.8% product. These yields are all higher than the 85% yield reported in patents. In the raw material (guaiacol) process development ,reacting catechol with dimethyl sulfate using chlorobenzene as a solvent gave 69.03% yield , while using catechol and iodomethane provided 73.48% yield. This report compares various manufacturing processes not only based on the product yield but also on raw materials cost,equi- pments cost and reaction time in order to find the best manufact- uring process for "guaifenesin".
|