Formulation Development and Evaluation of Carbamazepine Nanoparticles for Intranasal Delivery

At present, the most common form of delivery of drugs is the oral route. While this has the notable advantage of easy administration, it also has significant drawbacks – namely poor bioavailability due to first-pass hepatic metabolism and the tendency to produce rapid blood level change (both high and low), leading to a need for high and or frequent dosing, which can be both cost prohibitive and inconvenient. To overcome these difficulties there is a need for the development of a new drug delivery system; which will improve the therapeutic efficacy and safety of drugs by more precise i.e. site-specific, spatial, and temporal placement within the body thereby reducing both the size and number of doses. Carbamazepine is a sodium channel blocker, commonly used in the treatment of epileptic seizures. CBZ is a good antiepileptic agent, but it is poorly water soluble and has low absorbability after oral administration, leading to a low bioavailability of 50% (16, 17). In addition, it is supplied at a low dose (10 mg) and has a low molecular weight (236). Repeated administration reduces half-life due to autoinduction. It has a half-life of 24 hours on a single dose and lowers to 12 hours on chroming dosing. So this drug is an interesting candidate for the development of controlled-release nanoparticles. So, the present study aimed to develop and optimize carbamazepine-loaded nanoparticles and characterize them. Till date, no nasal formulation of carbamazepine has been developed. Therefore, mucoadhesive polymers grafted nanoparticles of carbamazepine will be a novel dosage form that will deliver the drug slowly into the systemic circulation and provide the desired therapeutic effect. Intranasal nanoparticle drug delivery is good for low-solubility drugs (BCS2). There seems to be a strong clinical need and market potential for a delivery system that can deliver drugs in a controlled manner.