Improving the Drug Delivery Efficacy of PVA Hydrogels

Abstract

Hydrogels based drug delivery systems have gained momentum in the recent past considering their ability to imbibe large amounts of water or biological fluids and resemblance to living tissues in their elasticity. These unique properties render hydrogels useful materials for
biomedical applications such as wound dressings, tissue engineering, soft contact lenses, protein sorption and recovery and artificial implants. Polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) is an excellent choice in the class of biomaterials because of its ease of hydrogel preparation, non-toxic and
non-carcinogenic nature, relative cost-effective value and compatibility in the body. Despite these many promising factors, however, poor mechanical property has hampered the
development of unmodified PVA as a stable hydrogel. Chemical cross-linking has, therefore, become a necessary tool to improve the structural integrity of PVA hydrogels. The present work focuses on the synthesis of glutaraldehyde cross-linked PVA hydrogels with and without the excipient cyclodextrin, followed by their subsequent characterization using ESR,XRD, DSC and SEM. A common anti-inflammatory drug, salicylic acid, has been chosen as the model drug. The synthesized PVA hydrogels were utilized as drug delivery system for salicylic acid