Preparation and Characterization of Sustained Released Zinc Citrate Encapsulated in Whey Protein Nanoparticles

Recent developments in natural biopolymer based drug delivery systems

Targeted delivery of drug molecules to diseased sites is a great challenge in pharmaceutical and biomedical sciences. Fabrication of drug delivery systems (DDS) to target and/or diagnose sick cells is an effective means to achieve good therapeutic results along with a minimal toxicological impact on healthy cells. Biopolymers are becoming an important class of materials owing to their biodegradability, good compatibility, non-toxicity, non-immunogenicity, and long blood circulation time and high drug loading ratio for both macros as well as micro-sized drug molecules. This review summarizes the recent trends in biopolymer-based DDS, forecasting their broad future clinical applications. Cellulose chitosan, starch, silk fibroins, collagen, albumin, gelatin, alginate, agar, proteins and peptides have shown potential applications in DDS. A range of synthetic techniques have been reported to design the DDS and are discussed in the current study which is being successfully employed in ocular, dental, transdermal and intranasal delivery systems. Different formulations of DDS are also overviewed in this review article along with synthesis techniques employed for designing the DDS. The possibility of these biopolymer applications points to a new route for creating unique DDS with enhanced therapeutic qualities for scaling up creative formulations up to the clinical level.

Whey Protein Isolate-Chitosan PolyElectrolyte Nanoparticles as a Drug Delivery System

Whey protein isolate (WPI), employed as a carrier for a wide range of bioactive substances, suffers from a lack of colloidal stability in physiological conditions. Herein, we developed innovative stabilized PolyElectrolyte Nanoparticles (PENs) obtained by two techniques: polyelectrolyte complexation of negatively charged WPI and positively charged chitosan (CS), and ionic gelation in the presence of polyanion tripolyphosphate (TPP). Therefore, the WPI-based core was coated with a CS-based shell and then stabilized by TPP at pH 8. The nanostructures were characterized by physiochemical methods, and their encapsulation efficiency and in vitro release were evaluated. The spherical NPs with an average size of 248.57 ± 5.00 nm and surface charge of +10.80 ± 0.43 mV demonstrated high encapsulation efficiency (92.79 ± 0.69) and sustained release of a positively charged chemotherapeutic agent such as doxorubicin (DOX). Z-average size and size distribution also presented negligible increases in size and aggregates during the three weeks. The results obtained confirm the effectiveness of the simultaneous application of these methods to improve the colloidal stability of PEN.