Permeation assays are important for the development of topical formulations applied on buccal mucosa. Swine buccal and esophageal epithelia are usually used as barriers for these assays, while frozen epithelia have been used to optimize the experimental setup. However, there is no consensus on these methods. In transdermal studies, barrier integrity has been evaluated by measuring electrical resistance (ER) across the skin, which has been demonstrated to be a simple, fast, safe, and cost-effective method. Therefore, the aims here were to investigate whether ER might also be an effective method to evaluate buccal and esophageal epithelium mucosa integrity for in vitro permeation studies, and to establish a cut-off ER value for each epithelium mucosa model. We further investigated whether buccal epithelium could be substituted by esophageal epithelium in transbuccal permeation studies, and whether their permeability and integrity were affected by freezing at -20 °C for 3 weeks. Fresh and frozen swine buccal and esophageal epithelia were mounted in Franz diffusion cells and were then submitted to ER measurement. Permeation assays were performed using lidocaine hydrochloride as a hydrophilic drug model. ER was shown to be a reliable method for evaluating esophageal and buccal epithelia. The esophageal epithelium presented higher permeability compared to the buccal epithelium. For both epithelia, freezing and storage led to decreased electrical resistivity and increased permeability. We conclude that ER may be safely used to confirm tissue integrity when it is equal to or above 3 kΩ for fresh esophageal mucosa, but not for buccal epithelium mucosa. However, the use of esophageal epithelium in in vitro transmucosal studies could overestimate the absorption of hydrophilic drugs. In addition, fresh samples are recommended for these experiments, especially when hydrophilic drugs are involved.
Keywords: buccal epithelium; esophageal epithelium; in vitro models; membrane resistivity; mucosal drug delivery; transbuccal drug delivery.