Drug delivery dosage forms made of tailor-made natural polysaccharides

The uses of natural polysaccharides in biomedical applications including drug delivery have been growing owing to their biosafety, biocompatibility, and biodegradability. Since long, natural polysaccharides are being used as drug delivery excipients, such as thickening agents, gelling agents, emulsifying agents, binding agents, disintegrating agents, swelling agents, encapsulating agents, matrix formers, foam stabilizers, and so on, in the formulations of many kinds of dosage forms. To improve their physicochemical and functional properties to be used as high-quality excipients in tablets, beads, microparticles, nanoparticles, gels and hydrogels, films and patches, scaffolds, and so on, natural polysaccharides are being tailor made via chemical derivatization of various functional groups (such as oxidation, phosphorylation, sulfation, thiolation, carboxymethylation, amidation, esterification, etc.), graft copolymerization, and crosslinking (using different crosslinkers). The current chapter deals with a comprehensive discussion about various drug delivery dosage forms, which have been reported to be composed of tailor-made natural polysaccharides.