Development of dietary fiber psyllium based hydrogel for use in drug delivery applications

Keeping in view the therapeutic and gel forming role of the psyllium seed mucilage in pharmaceutical industries, herein this article, its potential has been explored for developing the drug delivery (DD) carrier. The main aim of the study was to modify the psyllium polysaccharides through grafting and crosslinking of 2-methacryloyloxyethyl trimethylammonium chloride onto psyllium to develop the hydrogels for use in DD application. Various thermal, mechanical, physiochemical, biomedical properties of the hydrogel were determined along with characterization with 13C NMR, FTIR, XRD, TGA, DSC and AFM. The release of antibiotic drug cefuroxime occurred in sustained manner and followed Fickian diffusion mechanism and was best fitted in Higuchi kinetic model. The networks showed mesh size in the range between 25.14 to 38.92 nm during the change in crosslinker content in copolymerization reaction. It has been inferred from the results that these hydrogels could be used as a potential carrier for drug delivery.