Biopolymers

Starch; a green plants-based reserve polysaccharide has been commonly explored as an excipient for versatile applications in the food and pharmaceutical industry. In pharmaceutical industry, it serves as a binder, diluent and disintegrant for a wide range of conventional solid dosage forms like tablets, capsules, pellets etc. Over the past decades, a new generation of modifed starches have been introduced as functional excipients for drug delivery systems. Grafting, cross-linking, complexation etc comprise of some of the reported techniques utilised for manufacturing porous starch. Porous starch has been widely used in supension cell culture system for growth of cells and recombinant proteins for therapeutic use. It facilitates adhesion and proliferation of cells during tissue regeneration thus making it an excipient of choice for scaffold engineering. Pulmonary delivery of biomacromolecules like proteins, peptides and genes is fortified by starch owing to its excellent carrier properties. Porous starch has been explored as an analytical adjuvant for high performance protein chromatography. Porous starch imparts oxidation stability to high-oleic sunflower oil by its robust carrier properties. In this context, the development of porous starch (PS) has been explained, made by hydrogel to alcogel conversion; a industrially scalable technology. We have explored PS as a carrier for the dissolution rate enhancement of poorly water soluble drugs. PS has a specific surface area of 109.73 m2/g, high pore volume and improved wettability giving improved dissolution rate upto 9.65% compared to neat API and 1.99% higher bioavilbility of developed formulation compared to pure drug.