A comprehensive review on pharmaceutical uses of plant-derived biopolysaccharides.

Biopolysaccharides extracted from plants are mainly photosynthetic byproducts found in leaves, pods, stems, fruits, grains, seeds, corms, rhizomes, roots, bark exudates, and other plant parts. Recently, these plant-derived biopolysaccharides have received a great deal of attention as pharmaceutical excipients in a range of different dosage forms because of several key advantages, such as widespread accessibility from nature as plant-based sources are readily available, sustainable production, availability of easy and cost-effective extraction methodologies, aqueous solubility, swelling capability in the aqueous medium, non-toxicity, biodegradability, etc. The current review presents a comprehensive overview of the uses of plant-derived biopolysaccharides as effective pharmaceutical excipients in the formulations of different kinds of dosage forms, for example gels, pastes, films, emulsions, suspensions, capsules, tablets, nanoparticles, microparticles, beads, buccal formulations, transdermal formulations, ocular formulations, nasal formulations, etc.

Oil-entrapped sterculia gum-alginate buoyant systems of aceclofenac: development and in vitro evaluation.

The current investigation deals with the development and optimization of oil-entrapped sterculia gum-alginate buoyant beads containing aceclofenac by ionotropic emulsion-gelation technique using 3(2) factorial design. The effect of polymer to drug ratio and sodium alginate to sterculia gum ratio on the drug entrapment efficiency (%), and cumulative drug release after 7 h (%) was optimized. The optimized oil-entrapped sterculia gum-alginate buoyant beads containing aceclofenac (F-O) showed drug entrapment efficiency of 90.92±2.34%, cumulative drug release of 41.65±3.97% after 7 h in simulated gastric fluid (pH 1.2), and well buoyancy over 8 h in simulated gastric fluid (pH 1.2) with 5.20 min buoyant lag-time. The in vitro drug release from these buoyant beads followed Korsmeyer-Peppas model (R(2)=0.9866-0.9995) with anomalous (non-Fickian) diffusion drug release mechanism. These new sterculia gum-alginate buoyant beads containing aceclofenac were also characterized using SEM, FTIR, and P-XRD analysis.