The potential of various plants containing pectin as a material for disintegrating tablets

Abstract

Pectin is widely processed across the food and pharmaceutical industries. However, Indonesia currently lacks domestic pectin production facilities and relies entirely on imports, driving up manufacturing costs. Beyond its traditional uses, pectin shows immense promise as a natural tablet disintegrant due to its ability to absorb water, swell, and disrupt tablet matrices. Despite its potential, there are limited studies comparing Indonesian plant sources for optimal pectin extraction. This study aims to evaluate and develop natural pectin products from local flora, specifically comparing the pectin yield and disintegrant potential of five Indonesian fruits: banana, mango, watermelon, orange, and durian. This study employs a narrative review methodology utilizing electronic databases to analyze various fruit extraction methods and evaluate the mechanisms of these plant-derived pectins as tablet disintegrants. Among the five plants compared, watermelon yielded the lowest pectin concentration at approximately 2.5–7.12%, while orange peel shows the highest yield at approximately 82.82%. When utilized as a disintegrant, the mechanism of pectin involves four distinct stages: encapsulation, volume expansion, porosity enhancement, and subsequent drug release. For tablet formulation (wet granulation, dry granulation, and direct compression), the wet granulation method is highly recommended when incorporating these natural pectin-based active ingredients. Natural pectin extracted from diverse Indonesian plants holds significant promise as a functional tablet disintegrant, with orange peel serving as the most viable high-yield source. Developing this local resource offers a potential local substitute for synthetic disintegrants, which could ultimately reduce Indonesia's import dependency and support pharmaceutical self-sufficiency.