Student: Swaprakash Yogeshwaran
Project Mentors: Dr. Brent Vernon – SBHSE
Dr. Mehdi Nikkah – SBHSE
Dr. David Brafman – SBHSE
YouTube Link: View this video providing an overview of the project before joining the zoom meeting
Zoom Link: https://asu.zoom.us/j/92030545511
Zoom meeting time: 10am - noon
Abstract
An ideal drug-delivery system shows absorption with minimal adverse effects, which is determined by the route of administration. Oral drug delivery systems are the most preferred drug administration route due to its convenience, cost- effectiveness, and high patient compliance. The challenges in oral drug delivery include aqueous solubility, membrane permeability, and chemical and enzymatic stability of the encapsulated drugs. Alginates are established among the most versatile biopolymers, used in a wide range of applications. The conventional use of alginate as an excipient in drug products generally depends on the thickening, gel-forming, and stabilizing properties. A need for prolonged and better control of drug administration has increased the demand for tailor-made polymers. Alginate is a natural polymer that is biocompatible, biodegradable, and produces no systemic toxicity on administration. It is a family of polysaccharides composed of α-L-guluronic acid (G) and β-D-mannuronic acid (M) residues, arranged in homo-polymeric blocks of each type (MM, GG) and hetero-polymeric blocks (MG). The properties of the beads prepared by ionotropic gelation are influenced by formulation and processing parameters. Particle size distributions are important characteristics of microstructures in multiphase materials and modeling the particle size in drug delivery systems is a key parameter. The Weibull function is advantageous for modeling particle and section size distributions because it provides tractable analytic representations of these distributions. The Weibull distribution was chosen over other often used distribution functions such as lognormal, beta, and gamma, because of its simplicity and versatility. This project focuses on the DOE (Design of Experiments) to model particle size for Calcium Alginate beads.