Xanthan Gum a Versatile Biopolymer: Current Status and Future Prospectus in Hydro Gel Drug Delivery

Commercially available, most important microbial polysaccharide is xanthan gum. In many pharmaceutical products and cosmetics, xanthan gum has been widely used as emulsifying and suspending agent. The gelatinous layer creates hinderance to the penetration of water, thereby slowing down the solubilization of the xanthan gum. Its less solubility in polar solvents, is limiting the application of xanthan gum in various drug delivery systems. Biocompatibility, abundance in nature and hydrogel’s similarity with biological systems; are the characteristics of polysaccharides to be chosen as suitable material for biomedical applications. One of the natural polysaccharides which is gaining extensive interest of researchers in the development of hydrogel is xanthan gum. Various modification techniques have been developed to enhance the solubility of xanthan gum. The employed methods for xanthan gum hydrogels formulation are: 1). Chemical Crosslinking with epichlorhydrine, glutaraldehyde, metabisulphate, citric acid and graft polymerization. 2). Physical crosslinking by polyelectrolytes complexation, ionotropic gelation and freeze thaw technique. Xanthan gum and xanthan gum derivatives hydrogel systems can be employed in explicit areas; thus providing us pharmaceutically highly acceptable delivery system for site specific and controlled release; of drugs and enzymes.
Source: Current Chemical Biology - Category: Biochemistry Source Type: research