Immobilization of Therapeutic Deep Eutectic Solvents within fibers for drug delivery applications

• Autor(a) principal: Santos, Jorge Emídio Costa dos
• Data de Publicação: 2018
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10362/59926
• topic: Domínio/Área Científica::Engenharia e Tecnologia::Engenharia dos Materiais

The search for effective drug delivery systems has been subject of research over the last decades. Due the body´s many physiological barriers and the urgent need for increased bioavailability of active pharmaceutic ingredients (APIs), the efficient administration and therapeutic effect of a drug has become a great and important challenge nowadays. Transdermal drug delivery has recently gained attention in this field being mostly limited by the though barrier of the stratum corneum. Many studies have been conducted in order to enhance skin permeation of a drug and many transdermal patches are now available for commercial use due to its commodity and non-evasive properties. In this work, a therapeutic eutectic system designed to be effective at delivering ibuprofen through the skin was incorporated into a polymeric fibrous membrane produced by the Solution Blow Spinning method. An optimization of the fibrous membranes production was made, the impact of the Solution Blow Spinning parameters in fiber diameter was studied, retention capacity of the drug was evaluated as well as UV crosslinking efficiency and mechanical strength of the obtained membranes. The Solution Blow Spinning method showed to be simple and efficient at producing micrometric fibers with mean diameters ranging from 1 to 5 μm. The obtained membranes showed to be capable of retaining the eutectic drug but they were quite fragile and an overtime-controlled release was not achieved due to the polymer high solubility in water.