Targeted Delivery of Insulin by Psyllium Plant (Plantago ispaghula) based hydrogels/membranes

Developments in therapeutics are the need of hour for the benefit of mankind and to increase the quality of life. Diabetes mellitus is a non-curable disease affecting a great amount of world’s population. This genetic disorder gets worse with time and ultimately leads to various complications like renal failure, lower limb amputation, heart diseases and blindness. Hydrogels for quite recent time are being used for the drug delivery. The present article is related to the fabrication of psyllium based dermal patches insulin drug delivery system that could release insulin in a sustained and controlled manner. Psyllium, a natural polysaccharide, is a medicinally important dietary fiber and drug delivery system has developed a novel insulin loaded psyllium based hydrogels for glucose lowering. They can be used for the transdermal delivery of insulin as hypodermic administration of insulin is painful, complicated, can also results in allergic reactions and infections. For the sustained and steady release of insulin from fabricated hydrogels were also modified with the addition of graphene oxide nanoparticles. To study the structural aspects of these various polymeric networks thus formed were characterized with FTIR (Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy) and SEM (Scanning electron microscopy) which identifies the interaction/bonding among different functional groups and also indicating the layer of graphene oxide nanoparticles on the surface of hydrogels stage and release related experiments such as degradability, swelling kinetics, swelling ratio and drug kinetics were also performed. Because of its functionalization these unique 3D drug loaded polymeric hydrogels will have the double prospective of diabetes. Different types of psyllium based hydrogels were prepared, and the effect of ph on the release dynamics of insulin from drug loaded hydrogels has been studied to evaluate the drug release mechanism in-vitro and in-vivo. For in-vivo study avian skin was used a model. Fickian diffusion mechanism has been observed for the release of insulin at different ph both in and in-vivo and therefore these drug loaded hydrogels can be potentially used to develop pH-sensitive systems. Keeping in view the results of different analysis it can be concluded that these hydrogels can prove to be very useful for the treatment of diabetes mellitus.