Synthesis and Characterization of Hybrid Alginate/Cellulose Aerogels as Drug Delivery Carrier

摘要

Technology of material development on drug delivery system has expanded vastly nowadays. The potential of alginate and carboxymethyl cellulose (CMC) as drug delivery carrier is presented. The alginate and CMC was prepared as hybrid hydrogels via sol-gel method and dried by supercritical CO_2 and at ambient conditions. Their mechanical strength was physically observed by their shrinkage percentage. Different concentration of alginate and CMC were synthesized to determine the effect of material variation composition on the physical and chemical characteristics. Physical and chemical properties of the hybrid aerogels were investigated by FTIR and TGA analysis. Results demonstrated that drying the hydrogels by supercritical CO_2 produced alginate/CMC aerogels with smaller shrinkage percentage i.e. 12.5% in comparison to ambient drying that extremely shrank the hydrogel as high as 45.4%. for 3 wt% alginate/1 wt% CMC. This work suggests that the hybrid alginate/CMC aerogels dried by supercritical CO_2 has a great potential to be applied as drug delivery carrier due to its mechanical strength and good thermal stability at high temperature.