Abstract

The need to obtain drug delivery systems (DDS) for the treatment of various diseases including cancer has become an increasingly present priority to reduce the side effects of tratament. The administration of conventional drugs often requires high doses and prolonged treatments, which can reduce overall efficacy and even cause toxicity. In recent decades, biomaterials have been developed as a matrix component for the manufacture of materials that contain encapsulated medication for precise drug delivery, at predetermined rate and period of time. Colchicine is an alkaloid, one of many commercially available drugs that has been used for the treatment of arthritis and other ailments, but also as an anticancer drug, but its availability has always been in free drug form and not in controlled delivery systems. For this reason in this work it was carried out the encapsulation into micro/nanoparticle systems, using Polylactic acid (PLA) as a vehicle, and resorting to the microemulsification technique to carry out this process. It was possible to verify using a scanning electron microscope (SEM) that the particles presented spherical morphology, with size distribution between the nanometric and micrometric scale. The encapsulation of colchicine in the micro/nanoparticles could be demonstrated using indirectly the X-ray energy dispersion technique (EDX). Subsequently, using UV-Visible spectroscopy, the hydrolytic degradation at 37 °C of the polymeric systems was evaluated for 2 weeks, under two different conditions: at pH 7.4 and at pH 4.8. A controlled release curve was obtained with a release of 35% for the buffer at neutral pH and 30% for the buffer at acidic pH.