Abstract
Drug formulation is gathering innovative technologies where the use of natural products for the preparation of drug delivery systems is getting more and more considerations because of environmental concerns. For instance, vegetable oils get increasingly used because of their outstanding properties in terms of drug solubilization, biocompatibility and biodegradability. For expanding their application, to drug sustained-release for instance, oils have to be hardened under mild conditions with respect to green chemistry principals. The silica condensation was therefore chosen as cross-linking reaction by the mean the sol-gel reaction which when applied to vegetable oils led to biosourced hybrid organic/inorganic materials. To do so, oils were functionalized with alkoxysilanes precursors without solvent nor catalyst in order to obtain cross-linkable systems. Two chemical paths were studied. The first one, based on an epoxy-amine reaction between epoxydized linseed or soybean oils and the alkoxysilane precursor ended up with an uncontrolled reaction and a triglyceride disruption. The second, used castor oil as an hydroxylated raw material and was based on the hydroxy-isocyanate reaction. Valuable results were obtained and this silylated oil was formulated thanks to a new oil/water thermo-stabilized emulsion process. Simple and robust, this process allowed to simultaneously shape and harden hybrid microparticles. Ranging between 20 and 200 µm in diameter, hybrid microparticles were spherical, homogeneously distributed and were capable of entrapping and releasing lipophilic molecules. As a model, ibuprofen was efficiently encapsulated and was fully released over 8 hours in a simulated buffer. Furthermore, by changing the composition of hybrid microparticles (inorganic/organic ratio), it was also possible to extend release kinetics and significantly reduce the burst effect. Then, biocompatibility of those hybrid microparticles was demonstrated in vitro and an innovative study of the cross-linking reaction was performed. This study aimed to properly understand hydrolysis and polycondensation mechanisms and took the form of an in situ the sol-gel reaction monitoring. It allowed to identify an alternative biocompatible catalysts and gave an insight on how those reactions can be controlled to reach “stabilized" hybrids with constant properties and exhibiting robust and reproducible drug sustained-releases. Finally, it has been demonstrated that the sol-gel chemistry applied to vegetable oils for the synthesis of original and tunable hybrid materials with concerns to environmental and health issues, opened the gate towards innovations in drug formulation.