A biotechnological study on biosurfactants for drug delivery applications

Biosurfactants are microbially derived surface active agents that are rapidly emerging as ecofriendly and effective substitutes to synthetic ones conventionally utilized in diverse industries. Biosurfactants offer great promise in the pharmaceutical field due to their high surface activity, bioactivity, low toxicity, biocompatibility, and biodegradability. Apart from their utilization as wetting, cleansing, solubilizing and emulsifying agents in pharmaceutical, personal care and detergent industries, biosurfactants possess drug-like actions, justifying their investigation as anti-microbial, anti-inflammatory, and anti-tumor agents. Moreover, biosurfactants may play multiple roles as formulation components in drug delivery systems with well-established advantages over conventional drug formulations. The objective of the thesis was to provide data supporting the potential of biosurfactants in drug delivery applications. Developing a biosurfactant-based anticancer drug delivery system was the application selected. A lipopeptide biosurfactant (LBS) was targeted because of the surface activity and multiple biological functionalities of lipopeptide biosurfactants. Prodigiosin (PG), a secondary bacterial metabolite, was selected as the model drug because of its challenging lipophilicity and anticancer activity in addition to the lack of data on its delivery using biosurfactants. To the best of our knowledge, a combinatorial anticancer delivery system including nano-self-assemblies (nSAs) of a biosurfactant as a nanocarrier for PG has not been reported to date. This initiated the development of PG-loaded LBS nSAs as a bioinspired combinatorial delivery aiming at enhancing the solubility,anti-bacterial activity and anti-cancer activity of PG.