Friulchem S.p.A. has filed FC-Cubes patents in EU, US, BRASIL, AUSTRALIA, and MX. The idea started from it is not easy to administer oral medicines to pets. Many owners try to hide tablets in a piece of meat or cheese to give it to their cat or dog. While for the horses they have to deal mainly with products in powder or paste forms. It rarely works: the animal eats the treat and neglects the tablet. Tablets usually produced by extrusion.
Friulchem identified a different manufacturing method, which allows reaching a chewable matrix with all the benefits presented for the drugs already on the market, but without the limits connected to production by extrusion.
Friulchem technology is based on a compression stage, which shows different advantages compared to extrusion:
- Compression provides full control over the weight of the chewable cube and hence over the quantity of API contained in each unit of the finished product, thereby guaranteeing compliance with treatment;
- By compression the outcome could be obtained in different shapes, from the typical square to new “suggestions” heart, bones, fish-shape).
Additionally, FC-Cubes could be manufactured with higher fat and palatable material content, which leads to perfect appetency (total ingestion by animals even on a repeat basis). The compositions of the matrix developed in Friulchem is high palatable and able to mask also active components which are particularly disliked by the animals.