Production and Characterization of Alginate And Chitosan Microparticules in Microsystems

In recent years, research has focused on developing novel drugs and effectively strategies for delivering drugs to the target area in order to make treatment processes more effective. These strategies aim to increase the comfort of the patients by improving the bioavailability of the drug and reducing its cytotoxic effects. Significant part of the studies includes drug or gene delivery systems. Many studies, from the development of biopolymers that provide controlled release of drugs to the discovery of proteins or antibodies that provide recognition of the target region, are within this context. Therefore, encapsulation of active ingredients in the form of microparticles is important for the pharmaceutical industry to improve the rate of distribution and increase bioavailability of drugs with low solubility. Regardless of traditional methods to increase bioavailability, lots of different particle and nanoparticle processing methods have been developed.Hydrogels with hydrophilic polymeric network structure containing large amounts of water are commonly used biomaterials in the release of drug molecules. The polymeric network structure is accomplished by covalent and ionic bonds or cross-linking that includes physical bonds. It is assumed that polymeric micro / nanoparticles can increase the low absorption and bioavailability of bioactive agents in the body. Progresses in microtechnology and microfluidics have had profound effects in many areas such as drug discovery, biology, diagnosis, and tissue engineering. These systems made it possible to produce complex drug carriers with the desired size and drug content and facilitated more precise estimation of release profiles. The scope of this study is to develop a method for encapsulation of drug molecules in the form of micro / nanoparticles to increase the therapeutic activities. Accordingly, synthesis and characterization of micro / nanoscale particles using alginate and chitosan natural polymers were carried out in 3D microfabricated microfluidic devices with different geometries. The channel widths of the microfluidic devices, the flow rates of the phases in the channels and polymer concentrations were optimized in order to obtain the microparticles in the desired size during the synthesis. At the end of the conducted experiments, the lowest microparticles size was achieved under conditions for the flow rate ratio of 1:20 of 0.25% chitosan and 0.25% TPP (approximately 400 nm). Ampicillin have been used as model bioactive molecule for loading into microparticles under these conditions and its activities on different bacteria representing both gram positive and gram negative bacteria have been tested. Bioactivity tests concluded that antibiotic loaded microparticles show high inhibition activity against both groups of bacteria. These results showed that polymeric micro / nanoparticles can be applied successfully in encapsulation of drugs. This study has been supported by GümüşhaneUniversity, Scientific Research Projects Coordination Department. Project Number: 19.F5119.0101 Keywords: Alginate, Biopolymer, Emcapsulation, Hydrogel, Pharmaceutical, Chitosan, Microfluidic, Microparticle