Although being considered as a salubrious compound, the low oral bioavailability due to poor aqueous solubility and fast degradation rate in GI tract limits the bioefficacy of curcumin. Nanoparticles is a popular carrier system to enhance dosage efficiency of bioactive compounds. Even though there are many ways to prepare nanoparticles, disadvantages including insufficient loading, complicated processing procedure, and difficulties to harvest particles from solution limit their commercialization. An innovation technique, coaxial electrospraying, could overcome those struggles through the one-step preparation of bilayer nanoparticles. In terms of based materials, chitosan and alginate are frequently selected for the development of nanoparticles due to its biocompatible and non-toxic properties. In addition, the mucoadhesive property of the positive charged chitosan allows its attatchment onto the intestinal lining, extending contacting time and increasing the absorption rate. When chitosan contacts the mucus layer, tight junction in between cells will be opened letting the passage of containing bioactive compounds into the portal system. However, the fact that chitosan dissociate in lower pH environment urges the need of additional protection layer. In this sense, negatively charge alginate is used for the fabrication of surface protection coating for the chitosan core. Nanoparticles composed by two base materials formed the core/shell structure. The encapsulated compound will be located in the core section being well protected from harsh conditions  and will have better chance to be adsorbed. By using a coaxial needle, electrospray could produce the core/shell nanoparticle in one-step procedure. The objective of this work is to develop a simple way of producing core/shell nanoparticles to encapsulate curcumin through coaxial electrospray without the need of further drying. To optimize the properties of bilayer nanoparticle, response surface methodology was used to find suitable processing parameters, the compositional ratio of base materials and curcumin loading. By the end, we successfully proved that using coaxial electrospraying to produce bilayer nanoparticles is an innovative one-step method that could significantly save times and costs. This technique has great potential to replace the complicated process of producing delivery vehicle and could be widely applied to the development of oral formulation for many other bioactive compounds.

Encapsulating curcumin into chitosan/alginate bilayer nanoparticles by coaxial electrospray

256th National Meeting (2018)

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