Development of herpetrione nanosuspensions stabilized by glycyrrhizin for enhancing bioavailability and synergistic hepatoprotective effect

Fabrication and in vitro/vivo evaluation of quercetin nanocrystals stabilized by glycyrrhizic acid for liver targeted drug delivery

“…It's not difficult to speculate from our results that further increasing the mass ratio of QT to GL may result in a further reduction in particle size. However, GL is not well dissolved in water and gelation would be happened with excessive amount of GL in water ( Hang et al, 2021 ; Tucker et al, 2021 ), which adversely affects the fabrication of QT-NCs/GL. Thus, a mass ratio of 10:5 for QT to GL was selected as the suitable formulation for QT-NCs/GL fabrication.…”

“…QT-NCs were prepared using the wet media milling technique ( Hang et al, 2021 ). Initially, the stabilizer solution was formed by dissolving GL in deionized water and then 4 mL of stabilizer solution transferred into a 10 mL glass vial used as a milling chamber.…”

“…So far, commonly stabilizers used for drug NCs mainly include surfactants and polymers ( Li et al, 2021 ). In addition, food proteins (soybean protein isolate, whey protein isolate and β-lactoglobulin) ( Aditya et al, 2015 ; He et al, 2013 ), serum proteins (albumin and transferrin) ( Lu et al, 2014 ; Yin et al, 2016 ) and natural saponins (glycyrrhizin, panax notoginseng saponins and tea saponins) ( Hang et al, 2021 ; Jin et al, 2019 ; Long et al, 2020 ) were also explored as alternative stabilizers for drug NCs.…”

“…GL has been also used as multifunctional carrier to improve bioavailability of drugs with low water solubility or poor membrane permeability as it is able to increase the membrane fluidity and permeability by incorporation into the lipid bilayer ( Selyutina and Polyakov, 2019 ; Shen et al, 2021b ; Yang et al, 2015 ). In our previous study, GL was demonstrated to be a novel stabilizer of drug NCs for enhancing bioavailability and synergistic hepatoprotective effect due to the dual-property of surfactant stabilizer and active pharmaceutical ingredient ( Hang et al, 2021 ). More importantly, due to the presence of specific receptors in the hepatocytes, GL and its hydrolyzed metabolite glycyrrhetinic acid were served as specific ligands for liver targeting nanosystems ( Stecanella et al, 2021 ), such as liposomes, polymeric nanoparticles and nanogels ( Zhao et al, 2021a ).…”