Investigation on arrowroot starch based polymer blends for buccal drug delivery applications

Abstract

newline Starch has been used in many applications, especially in drug delivery applications due to its advantages like biodegradability, swellability, compatibility with other biodegradable polymers, biocompatibility, low cost and large availability. Properties of starch primarily depends on amylose and amylopectin content in them. The film forming capacity of Starch makes it a promising material for buccal film drug delivery application. The neat starch films are brittle in nature therefore suitable plasticizers and modifications with compatible polymers are required. In the present work, commercially available arrowroot starch has been used as a polymeric material for buccal film drug delivery application. The buccal drug delivery system has grasped the attention in recent years due to its advantage of avoiding the First pass hepatic metabolism and access the drug directly into the systemic blood circulation which makes more bioavailability than gastrointestinal route of drug release. Mucoadhesion of the film is the most important criterion to adhere to the buccal mucosa, therefore arrowroot starch is suitably modified with mucoadhesive polymers to be used in buccal film drug delivery application. In the present study the model drug used is glipizide, which is a widely consumed antidiabetic drug. But the adverse effect of the drug is - it leads to gastrointestinal disturbance on chronic usage when it is administered orally. In order to avoid first pass hepatic metabolism and gastrointestinal disturbance of glipizide drug, buccal film is used as the drug delivery route. Arrowroot starch with 46.8% of amylose content and 53.2% of amylopectin content was evaluated and taken for the studies. Arrowroot starch is suitably modified with two polymers namely carboxymethyl iv cellulose and poly (acrylic acid - co - itaconic acid) copolymer. Initially starch has been gelatinized with water and CMC has made into a homogenous solution. Starch/carboxymethyl cellulose(CMC) blend is prepared by mixing Starch and CMC in