Formulation and In-Vitro Evaluation of Metronidazole Mucoadhesive Microspheres.

The advancement of pharmacokinetics has established that the drug should be present above a certain minimum concentration in blood for as long a period as possible for optimum drug therapy. Although, continuous infusion has been recognized as a superior mode of drug administration to maintain a constant and prolonged rug level in the body such mode of administration entails certain risk and hence requires hospitalization of the patient and close supervision. As a result, solid oral dosage forms have become the most important and mostly used class of drug delivery system. Ordinary tablet and capsules known as conventional drug delivery system have to be administered several times a day depending on the biological half-life of the drug. Such multiple dosing may reduce invariably high plasma level of drug leading to waste of costly drugs and patient noncompliance. Two important features as important while developing as drug delivery system. i.e., it should deliver the drug at a rate dictated by the needs of the body over the entire period of treatment and the drug should solely reach the site of action. On comparing the major criteria in evaluation such as drug content, encapsulation efficiency, in vitro wash off test and in vitro drug release characteristics, the formulation F9 was selected as the best formulation, as it showed the drug content as 46.96% and encapsulation efficiency was 87.21%, showed a good mucoadhesive nature in the in vitro wash off test was nearly 62.18% up to 8 hrs and in vitro drug released 81.76% up to 10 hrs. Based on all the above evaluation parameters it was concluded that the formulation F9 was found to be best formulation among the formulations F1 to F9 were prepared. The mechanism of drug released was calculated by applying the kinetic models and it was concluded that the formulations F9 follows the Korsmeyer – Peppas model and it undergoes Fickian diffusion mechanism (n≥0.5). According to the stability studies, the formulation F9 was found to be stable up to 3 months of storage period in drug content and in vitro drug released profile. The formulations F9 was concluded best formulation among the formulations were prepared