Characterization and drug delivery of AaltoCell™ microcrystalline cellulose

Abstract

Microcrystalline cellulose (MCC) is widely utilized in various fields, such as food, pharmaceutics, medicine, and cosmetics. As such an important component, MCC has been deeply studied during recent decades. In this thesis, studies focused on AaltoCell™ MCC, which has been manufactured by a novel AaltoCell™ method. This method is more environmentally friendly than the traditional manufacturing methods, which makes this MCC worthy to be researched for applications.

The main tasks of this thesis were characterizing rheological properties of different grades of AaltoCell™ MCC and applying them in controlled drug delivery system as the matrix material. As comparison, a commercial grade of MCC, Avicel® PH-101 was studied. Three types of rheological experiments were conducted to AaltoCell™ MCC, oscillatory stress sweep, frequency sweep, and dynamic viscosity measurement. In the drug release experiments, metronidazole and lysozyme were used as model compounds whose release rates form the gel-like AaltoCell™ matrices were studied.

The results of the rheological experiments indicate that rheological properties strongly depend on the concentration of AaltoCell™ MCC, which means that with increasing the concentration, the rheological properties are significantly increased. The results of the drug release experiments indicate that AaltoCell™ MCC could efficiently control diffusion of both large and small molecule which shows great potential for a drug delivery application.

In further study, the release profiles of other compounds and effect of concentration on the release profiles could be studied.