Impregnação assistida por fluido supercrítico de curcumina em micropartículas de quitosana

Abstract

Curcumin, a polyphenol extracted from turmeric, has many therapeutic properties. Those benefits make this compound a promissing alternative in medicine that can be used in the treatment of diseases such as arthritis, metabolic syndrome, liver disease, obesity, neurodegenerative illness and multiple types of câncer. Colon cancer is high occurrence disease and it’s the second most letal type of cancer. As chemotherapy has too many side effects, new natural products are widely researched as alternative drugs to treat all kinds of cancer. Curcumin is being researched as a replacement for the traditional chemotherapy drugs, however, it’s instability when ingested makes it unable to reach the colon with treatment potential. Incorporating the compound in a biopolymer is a common strategy to by-pass this problem and allow the drug to reach the desired location. Chitosan is an example of biopolymer which suits this characteristics and can be used to transport the curcumin through the digestive tract. Supercritical impregnation was the technique chosen to incorporate the curcumin into the chitosan, which is a method that utilizes a supercritical fluid technology to achieve this objective. The goal of this work was to impregnate the chitosan particles with curcumin using carbon dioxide expanded in ethanol and evaluate its delivery capacity as well as making the mathematical modeling of the process. SEM and FTIR were used to characterize the particles before and after the impregnation. The pressure of 200 bar resulted in highest percent and amount of curcumin impregnated (15,8% and 3,16 mg) in the particles and there was no significant difference between the quantities of ethanol evaluated. The first order model was the one that best described the curcumin liberation in PBS (pH 7,4).