Formulation and characterization of controlled release ketoprofen microsponges

Abstract EN

Microsponges are porous, polymeric microspheres drug delivery systems.

They bestow a controlled release of drugs, reduce systemic side effects and enhance stability.

The aim of the present work was to formulate microsponges loaded with Ketoprofen (KP) by the quasi emulsion solvent evaporation method using Ethyl cellulose (EC) as a polymer and the polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) as an emulsifying agent, to study the influence of drug: polymer ratio (Ra), emulsifier concentration (Emc) and stirring rate (Sr) on the production yield (PY), encapsulation efficiency (EE) using the design of experiment to identify the key factors and establish a relationship between the choosing response and those factors using analyze of variance (ANOVA) and to studythe drug release and kinetics evaluation.

Results revealed that the production yield and the entrapment efficiency are affected by polymer ratio (Ra), when the ratio change from 1:1 to 1:5 the production yield change from 40.42% to 81.97% and the encapsulation efficiency varies from 36.41% to 56.28% of Ketoprofen.

The stirring rate and emulsifier concentration have no effect on production yield values.

When we increase Sr and Emc from the min value to the max value, EE degrease from 48.37% to 43.72% and from 60.37% to 32.32% respectively.In vitro drug release studies were carried out up to 8 h in phosphate buffer (pH 6.8) media and the release data showed good correlation with the Higuchi model.