The purpose of the present study was to develop buoyant beads for the intragastric delivery of furosemide in order to evaluate the effect of incorporated sunflower oil on physiochemical properties of alginate beads. Sunflower oil entrapped buoyant alginate beads of furosemide were prepared by the emulsion-gelation technique. During the preparation of various batches of beads, the ratio of sunflower oil to water (v/v), the ratio of drug to polymer (w/w), were kept as variables at two levels; either high or low. Smooth, spherical beads with nominal weight variation were obtained. All batches of beads floated for 24 hours with a lag time of 5-10 min. The release of drug followed for 5 hours. Higuchi and first order kinetic modeling indicated a diffusion-controlled release of drug from the beads. The study also demonstrated the influence of sunflower oil on drug entrapment (81-95%) and in vitro release. A higher level of oil increased drug entrapment efficiency but retarded drug release rate as compared to a lower level of oil containing beads.
A rapid and sensitive spectrofluorimetric method was developed and validated for the determination of erlotinib (ETB), a potent anticancer drug, in spiked human plasma without any derivatization. The described method was validated and the analytical parameters of linearity, accuracy, precision (intra- and inter-day), limit of detection (LOD), and limit of quantification (LOQ) were evaluated. The relation between the fluorescence intensity and concentration was found to be linear (r(2) 0.9998) over the range 125 to 1000 ng/mL with the detection limit of 15 ng/mL. A simple liquid-liquid extraction method was followed in order to extract the drug from spiked plasma. The mean absolute recoveries of ETB were 85.59 % (±0.57), 86.91 % (±1.77) and 89.31 % (±3.01) at spiked plasma ETB concentration of 5000, 3750 and 2500 ng/mL, respectively. The spectrofluorimetric method presented here is a rapid, simple, specific, and reproducible method and can be used to characterize the plasma pharmacokinetics of ETB.
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