Pharmaceutical Applications of Various Natural Gums

Abstract

Gums are the important ingredients in many pharmaceutical preparations owing to their biodegradability, abundant availability, non-toxicity, and low cost. In today's scenario, these are competing with many synthetic polymers for use as various pharmaceutical products and have made a remarkable journey from just being an excipient to novel drug delivery carriers. Particularly, the better understanding of their physiochemical properties and establishment of safety profile data has attracted researchers and pharmaceutical industries worldwide to unveil the hidden potential of natural gums. Although modification of natural gums has generated the entirely new class of polymeric materials useful in advanced drug delivery applications, exploration of natural gums in the design for development of nanomedicine and gene therapy has widened their applications as novel delivery materials. In this chapter, we have highlighted both basic and novel pharmaceutical applications of natural gums along with their future potential.