Formulation, characterization and testing of tetracaine hydrochloride-loaded albumin-chitosan microparticles for ocular drug delivery

Abstract

Most ocular surgical procedures take approximately 60 min to complete, the anaesthetic property of the safest drug, tetracaine, is initiated in a few minutes and lasts approximately 10-15 min. The purpose of the present study was to develop an ocular tetracaine formulation which can produce an immediate onset of action and/or longer duration of action during the entire surgical procedure. Tetracaine-loaded microparticle formulation was prepared by the method of spray-drying and characterized in terms of size, zeta potential, morphology, thermal stability and release pattern. The study reports a microparticulate ocular formulation with minimum cytotoxicity and optimum cellular uptake. In addition, microencapsulated tetracaine was found to significantly increase the duration of action of the drug up to 4-fold. Taken together, the results presented in this work described albumin-chitosan microparticles to be an effective delivery platform for ocular anaesthetic agents and a potential treatment of various ocular diseases.

Drug Carrier Systems Using Chitosan for Non Parenteral Routes

“…This difference can be attributed to difference in solubility of chitosans [108]. Similar results were reported in other studies [109][110][111][112].…”

Advantages and challenges of the spray-drying technology for the production of pure drug particles and drug-loaded polymeric carriers

“…Finally, the particles loaded with drugs obtained by spray-drying could be administered by different routes such as oral [127][128][129][130][131][132], pulmonary [12,23,82,133,134), ophthalmic [93,111,135], parenteral [22,38,136], nasal [60,120,121,137], and vaginal [138], stressing its great In vitro tests showed that their mucoadhesion was 2-fold higher than that of a hydroxyethylcellulose gel formulation [138].…”

“…into particles could protect the cargo against harsh conditions such as chemical and enzymatic degradation[28,93]. For example, Seremeta et al encapsulated the anti-HIV didanosine within poly(epsilon-caprolactone) (PCL) MPs both by suspension and simple emulsion followed for spray-drying to avoid its fast gastric degradation that leads to low oral bioavailability (20-40%)[51].…”

Phase-separated chitosan–fibrin microbeads for cell delivery

“…In most cases such microspheres are made in the absence of cells, for use as drug or growth factor delivery vehicles (Addo et al, 2010; Solorio et al, 2010) or as microcarrier substrates for subsequent attachment of cells to the surface (Gorodetsky et al, 2004; Natesan et al, 2010). In some cases, cells have been entrapped directly inside the microbeads.…”