Development of Nevirapine Loaded Novel Surfactant Free Polymeric Emulsion and Investigations for Its Suitability as Drug Delivery Vehicle

摘要

The main aim of this study was to prepare the surfactant free polymeric emulsion by using chitosan (CHI), a ubiquitous biopolymer for the delivery of Nevirapine (NVP). The developed system was characterized in terms of stability and payload efficiency The entrapment efficiency (EE) of NVP was 92.57±2.52% when the emulsion was prepared with optimized 2 wt% CHI solution with globule size of 1.013±1.07 m. The release of NVP formulation with high CHI concentration (2 wt%) was fairly sustained: 50.23±1.05% in 24 h. The zeta potential of optimized 2 wt% CHI formulation was found to be +74.6 mV which is helpful to develop high-energy barrier which causes repulsion of adjacent droplets, resulting in the formation of stabilized emulsions. The fluorescence microscopy data revealed that the emulsion formed is O/W. It was shown that it is possible to have stable emulsions of oil in the aqueous solution by adding only CHI without any additional surfactant. This result implies that a stable emulsion can be developed devoid of surfactants and can be used as sustained delivery vehicle for hydrophobic drugs avoiding surfactant induced toxicity in bio-system.