Journal
CHEMICAL ENGINEERING JOURNAL
Volume 277, Issue -, Pages 286-294Publisher
ELSEVIER SCIENCE SA
DOI: 10.1016/j.cej.2015.04.149
Keywords
Nanocomposites; Microparticles; Folic acid; Polyvinylpyrrolidone; Supercritical antisolvent process; Precipitation mechanisms
Categories
Funding
- MIUR (Italian Ministry of Scientific Research)
Ask authors/readers for more resources
In this work, supercritical antisolvent (SAS) precipitation was proposed for the production of polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP)-folic acid (FA) microspheres, to test the applicability of this technique to the production of coprecipitates of biomedical interest with improved bioavailability. The effect of SAS operating parameters, such as polymer/drug ratio, pressure, temperature and concentration was investigated to identify successful process conditions. We obtained different kind of precipitates: nanoparticles with a mean diameter down to 50 nm, sub-microparticles with a mean diameter in the range 0.29-0.65 mu m and microparticles in the range 0.8-3.8 mu m. These powders were characterized to determine drug effective loading and drug release profiles and to measure FA degradation. These analyses revealed that SAS process allowed the production of PVP-FA coprecipitates only in specific ranges of SAS process parameters and in the case of microparticles production. The drug dissolution rate of the PVP + FA coprecipitates in a phosphate buffered saline solution (PBS) was about 20 times faster than the one of unprocessed FA. Moreover, SAS process had no significant detrimental effect on the stability of the vitamin. We tried to explain the precipitation mechanisms producing the observed morphologies and the large improvement of the FA dissolution rate, when it was encapsulated in PVP microparticles. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available