SCREENING AND OPTIMIZATION OF VALACYCLOVIR NIOSOMES BY DESIGN OF EXPERIMENTS

Objective: The objective of the study was to perform a screening, optimization of valacyclovir niosomal formulation to achieve a sustained release of drug using the design of experiments by 32 full factorial design.Methods: Valacyclovir loaded niosomes were prepared using thin film hydration method by varying the ratio of Span 60 and Cholesterol. The prepared niosomes were evaluated for vesicle size, entrapment efficiency, cumulative drug release, fourier transformed infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), zeta potential and surface morphology by field emission scanning electron microscopy (FESEM).Results: The valacyclovir was successfully encapsulated and its entrapment efficiency ranged from 36.70 % to 50.62 %. The average vesicle size of the niosomes was found to be 431 to 623 nm. At 8th hour the drug release varied from 77.50% to 96.31 %. The optimized niosomes were multilamellar with a surface charge potential of about-43.2 mV. The studies revealed that the interaction of cholesterol and surfactant had a substantial effect on vesicle size, entrapment efficiency and drug release from the niosomes. The release kinetics of the optimized niosomes followed zero order kinetics with fickian diffusion controlled mechanism. The stability studies were performed for the optimized formulation and found that the formulation is stable at 4°C ± 2°C.Conclusion: Model equations were developed for the responses. No significant difference was observed between the predicted and observed value, showing that the developed model is reliable