Formulation and Evaluation of In situ Fucoidan Loaded Collagen Hydrogel for the Management of Colitis

Abstract

Ulcerative colitis is a type of inflammatory bowel disease that causes chronic intestinal inflammation in gastrointestinal tract mainly in innermost lining of colonic mucosa In any of the UC drug therapy regimens maintaining remission is challenging and about 20 to 40 percent of patients don t respond to conventional UC medications namely amino salicylates steroids and immunosuppressive drugs These agents can weaken the patients immune system thus enhancing the risk of infectious diseases Therefore in our exploration we probed to test marine derived anti inflammatory compounds as potential agents to treat UC Fucoidan a complex fucose rich sulphated polysaccharide originated in edible brown algae with known anti inflammatory properties was isolated from Turbinaria ornate Collagen Achillis tendon is another agent that may provide a beneficial effect in wound healing and tissue regeneration Collagen has also reported to possess anti UC properties Collagen has a limitation of being in solution form even at high concentrations We therefore formulated fucoidan with collagen that underwent a sol gel transition and yielded a gel like consistency in situ This formulation showed sustained release of fucoidan for about 12 hours The fucoidan collagen and the fucoidan collagen formulation was tested in the dextran sodium sulfate DSS induced colitis model in mice In comparison to the vehicle treated group fucoidan collagen hydrogel formulation led to significant reduction in the clinical scores and rectal bleeding which was higher than the reference standard mesalamine and those seen with fucoidan and collagen given alone newline