Polymer-based nanotechnologies are now proposed as an alternative to classical formulations for drug administration, delivery and targeting. Over the past few decades, there has been considerable interest in developing biodegradable nanoparticle as effective drug delivery devices. The body distribution of colloidal drug delivery systems is mainly influenced by two physicochemical properties, particle size and surface characteristics. Protein nanoparticles generally vary in size from 50-300 nm and they hold certain advantages such as greater stability during storage, stability in vivo, non-toxicity, non-antigen and ease to scale up during manufacture over the other drug delivery systems.
Here nanoparticles of gelatin type A were prepared by a two-step desolvation method as a colloidal drug delivery system and the essential parameters in fabrication were optimized by Taguchi design method. Gelatin was dissolved in distilled water under room temperature range. Acetone was added as a desolvating agent to precipitate the high molecular weight (HMW) gelatin. The supernatant was discarded and the HMW gelatin re-dissolved by distilled water and stirring at 600 rpm. Acetone were added drop-wise to form nanoparticles. At the end of the process, glutaraldehyde solution was used as a cross-linking agent for preparing nanoparticles. The centrifuge was applied for purification stage. For characterizing the nanoparticle sample AFM, SEM, as well as FTIR was employed. By introducing 4 factors (temperature, gelatin concentration, agitation speed and the amount of acetone) in 4 levels to the software 16 experiments were done and the optimum condition was happened in 50° C, 50 mg/ml gelatin concentration, 75 ml acetone had the best result and the nanoparticle size was under 160 nm. The mechanistic of the optimum conditions for preparing protein nanoparticles as well as their characterization were discussed. |