Fabrication and characterization of Solid Lipid Nanoparticles and Nanostructured Lipid Carriers

Abstract

The effect of drugs could be greatly improved by encapsulating drugs into nanoparticles. Nanoparticles can facilitate delivery of a variety of drugs, allow transport to target site and achieve prolonged drug delivery. This thesis explores drug delivery systems based on solid lipids. The procedure and materials used, was determined based on a literature survey of published articles.

Generally, the lipid systems presents the advantage of low toxicity due to the composition of physiological lipids. Two types of lipid nanoparticles were evaluated for drug delivery purposes. Systematic screening of the formulation and process parameters led to the development of a nanosystem composed of a solid lipid (stearic acid) and liquid lipid (isopropyl palmitate) using a melt-emulsification technique.

The selected variant demonstrated good physical stability upon storage for two months, and was able to encapsule curcumin. The three characterization techniques all indicated particles in nanometer-range.

Little or no explanations of the underlying mechanisms of the parameters affecting the lipid nanoparticle are found in published literature, and this thesis make an effort to explain the successes and failures of the systems tested.