Biocompatibility of Chitosan Carriers with Application in Drug Delivery

Abstract

Chitosan is one of the most used polysaccharides in the design of drug delivery strategies for administration of either biomacromolecules or low molecular weight drugs. For these purposes, it is frequently used as matrix forming material in both nano and micron-sized particles. In addition to its interesting physicochemical and biopharmaceutical properties, which include high mucoadhesion and a great capacity to produce drug delivery systems, ensuring the biocompatibility of the drug delivery vehicles is a highly relevant issue. Nevertheless, this subject is not addressed as frequently as desired and even though the application of chitosan carriers has been widely explored, the demonstration of systems biocompatibility is still in its infancy. In this review, addressing the biocompatibility of chitosan carriers with application in drug delivery is discussed and the methods used in vitro and in vivo, exploring the effect of different variables, are described. We further provide a discussion on the pros and cons of used methodologies, as well as on the difficulties arising from the absence of standardization of procedures.

Multimodal Magnetic-Plasmonic Nanoparticles for Biomedical Applications

“…A similar chitosan Fe 3 O 4 @Au nanomaterial showed a temperature increase at various concentrations under illumination of a NIR laser [27]. Chitosan is a polysaccharide often used due to its interesting biopharmaceutical properties; for example, it's high mucoadhesion and suitability for facilitating drug delivery, and is the subject of many reviews [63][64][65][66]. The authors also highlighted the multiple uses of the synthesised nanoparticles-not only as photothermal agents but for use in simultaneous MRI and dark field imaging.…”

Pullulan-based nanoparticles as carriers for transmucosal protein delivery

“…This assay assesses cells metabolic efficiency, relying on the evaluation of enzymatic function. To do so, after the exposure to the test materials/carriers, cells are incubated with yellow tetrazolium (MTT) salts which are reduced to purple-blue formazan crystals by active mitochondrial dehydrogenases (Rodrigues et al, 2012a). In this manner, a higher concentration of the formazan dye corresponds to a higher amount of metabolically active cells, which is usually interpreted as higher cell viability.…”

“…Addressing the biocompatibility of drug carriers is a major issue in developing drug delivery systems (Gaspar and Duncan, 2009;Liu et al, 2008;Rodrigues et al, 2012a) and current international guidelines require the contextualisation of biocompatibility with a specific route of administration and dose of the material (Gaspar and Duncan, 2009). In turn, it is also mandatory to treat polymers and polymer-based carriers as different entities, as the proper carrier structure, among other parameters, might affect the final behaviour (Aillon et al, 2009;Gaspar and Duncan, 2009;Williams, 2008).…”

“…According to the guidelines issued by the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO), testing biocompatibility implies the performance of a complete set of assays, addressing at first cellular morphology, membrane integrity and metabolic efficiency, but in some cases also including genotoxicity, as well as acute and sub-acute toxicity (ISO, 2003(ISO, , 2009aRodrigues et al, 2012a). In this work we performed one of the most used assays to test the cytotoxicity of materials and carriers, which is the metabolic assay MTT.…”

Self-assembled polysaccharide nanostructures for controlled-release applications

“…Chitosan (13, Figure 5) is valued in the pharmaceutical and biomedical fields [47] for its mucoadhesive properties, easy chemical modification, antibacterial properties [48] and pH-responsiveness near physiological pH (7.4).…”