Studies on Biotinylated Liposomes as Potential Carries for Enhancing Oral Absorption of Curcumin

Abstract

Oral dosage forms have many obvious advantages like simple, painless and self-administered. While the bioavailability of drugs are always low for they are unstable and usually degraded within gastrointestinal tract. Curcumin, a multifunction native compound, can be used in curing many diseases while the oral bioavailability is relatively low, limiting its clinical effectiveness. The aim of this study was to investigate the method of increasing the bioavailability by the addition of biotin, which was a kind of vitamin helping the liposomes to uptake by biotin receptors. In situ rat Single-Pass Intestinal Perfusion Model (SPIP) was applied to investigate the different content of biotin and caco-2 cells monolayer model was established to mimic the intestinal tract in drug transportation study. As the results shows that biotin decorated liposomes (biotin-PEG-DSPE-Lip) had a better cellular uptake and transportation rate compared to biotin undecorated ones (PEG-DSPE-Lip). It indicated that the bioavailability of curcumin had been increased.