Carbohydrate polymers based on fructose from Agave tequilana Weber var. azul, known as fructans, have a great potential as carriers of drugs due to their chemical structure, which makes them non degradable in the upper digestive tract, but enzymatically degradable in the colon. However, esterification is necessary to obtain hydrophobic compounds capable to preserve drugs at stomach conditions. We esterified fructans with acetyl, lauroyl and palmitoyl moieties for encapsulating ibuprofen as a model drug. Esterification of fructan was confirmed using attenuated total reflectance infrared spectroscopy (ATR-FTIR), while the degree of substitution (DS) was quantified by proton nuclear magnetic resonance (¹H-NMR).

Date Published: 9 September 2019
PDF: 7 pages
Proc. SPIE 11128, Infrared Remote Sensing and Instrumentation XXVII, 111280X (9 September 2019); doi: 10.1117/12.2526135

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 11128:
Infrared Remote Sensing and Instrumentation XXVII
Marija Strojnik; Gabriele E. Arnold, Editor(s)