The purpose of this study was to investigate a new polymeric system and production process in which self-assembled doxorubicin-loaded nanoparticles were synthetized by using a water-in-oil microemulsion as a template and calcium ions as cross-linkers. The manufacturing process combined cross-linking of carbomer within a W/O microemulsion followed by a phase-separation technique to avoid using organic solvents for extraction. To assess the sustained release behavior of doxorubicin from the nanoparticles, we have developed a new simple method based on the permeability coefficient of a synthetic membrane mounted on Franz diffusion cell system. Franz cells were preferred over the commonly used dialysis tubing because they provide adequate measures of the diffusion area as well as the volumes of the media in both sides of the membrane. The lower permeability values obtained for nanoparticles have shown that the release is a limiting step of the diffusion process, while the calculated straight lines may imply that the apparent release rate of the nanoparticle ensembles is close to a zero-order kinetics. The new drug release method for the evaluation of nano-carriers, utilizing a simple linear model to determine the permeability coefficient, has been proposed for perfect sink and non-sink conditions.
Keywords: Doxorubicin; drug release; microemulsion; permeability coefficient; polymeric nanoparticles.