Cancer is one of the most serious health problems and the second leading cause of death worldwide, and with an ageing and growing population, problems related to cancer will continue. In the battle against cancer, many therapies and anticancer drugs have been developed. Chemotherapy and relevant drugs are widely used in clinical practice; however, their applications are always accompanied by severe side effects. In recent years, the drug delivery system has been improved by nanotechnology to reduce the adverse effects of the delivered drugs. Among the different candidates, core–sheath nanofibres prepared by coaxial electrospinning are outstanding due to their unique properties, including their large surface area, high encapsulation efficiency, good mechanical property, multidrug loading capacity, and ability to govern drug release kinetics. Therefore, encapsulating drugs in coaxial electrospun nanofibres is a desirable method for controlled and sustained drug release. This review summarises the drug delivery applications of coaxial electrospun nanofibres with different structures and drugs for various cancer treatments.
Electrospinning is increasingly becoming a viable means of producing drug delivery vehicles for oral delivery, particularly as issues of manufacturing scalability are being addressed. In this study, electrospinning is explored as a taste-masking manufacturing technology for bitter drugs. The taste-masking polymer Eudragit E PO (E-EPO) was electrospun, guided by a quality by design approach. Using a design of experiment, factors influencing the production of smooth fibers were investigated. Polymer concentration, solvent composition, applied voltage, flow rate, and gap distance were the parameters examined. Of these, polymer concentration was shown to be the only statistically significant factor within the ranges studied (p-value = 0.0042). As the concentration increased, smoother fibers were formed, coupled with an increase in fiber diameter. E-EPO (35% w/v) was identified as the optimum concentration for smooth fiber production. The optimized processing conditions identified were a gap distance of 175 mm, an applied voltage of between 15 and 20 kV, and a flow rate of 1 mL/h. Using this knowledge, the production optimization of electrospun E-EPO with chlorpheniramine maleate (CPM), a bitter antihistamine drug, was explored. The addition of CPM in drug loads of 1:6 up to 1:10 CPM/E-EPO yielded smooth fibers that were electrospun under conditions similar to placebo fibers. Solid-state characterization showed CPM to be molecularly dispersed in E-EPO. An electronic tasting system, or E-tongue, indicated good taste-masking performance as compared to the equivalent physical mixtures. This study therefore describes a means of producing, optimizing, and assessing the performance of electrospun taste-masked fibers as a novel approach to the formulation of CPM and potentially other bitter drug substances.
The orally disintegrating tablet (ODT) has shown vast potential as an alternative oral dosage form to conventional tablets wherein they can disintegrate rapidly (≤30 s) upon contact with saliva fluid and should have an acceptable mouthfeel as long as their weight doesn’t exceed 500 mg. However, owing to the bitterness of several active ingredients, there is a need to find a suitable alternative to ODTs that maintains their features and can be taste-masked more simply and inexpensively. Therefore, electrospun nanofibers and solvent-cast oral dispersible films (ODFs) are used in this study as potential OD formulations for prednisolone sodium phosphate (PSP) that is commercially available as ODTs. The encapsulation efficiency (EE%) of the ODFs was higher (≈100%) compared to the nanofibers (≈87%), while the disintegration time was considerably faster for the electrospun nanofibers (≈30 s) than the solvent-cast ODFs (≈700 s). Hence, accelerated release rate of PSP from the nanofibers was obtained, due to their higher surface area and characteristic surface morphology that permitted higher wettability and thus, faster erosion. Taste-assessment study using the electronic-tongue quantified the bitterness threshold of the drug and its aversiveness concentration (2.79 mM). Therefore, a taste-masking strategy would be useful when further formulating PSP as an OD formulation.
Quantum calculations plus lipophilicity (log P) lead to usefully accurate predictions of binding affinity that allow correction of crystal structures.
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