EDTA-Mediated Crosslinking of Guar gum: A Sustainable Platform for Transdermal Curcumin Delivery

Abstract

Crosslinking of carbohydrate polymers is advantageous for specific applications in food, textiles, biomedical, etc. In the present study, guar galactomannan has been crosslinked with ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid (EDTA), a green, competent, economic, efficient crosslinker under aqueous conditions at ambient temperature to incorporate all carbons of reactants in the crosslinked product. Intriguingly, EDTA also acted as autocatalyst under mild acidic conditions resulting in water as the side product. The reaction parameters were optimized by varying concentrations of EDTA (0.25, 0.5, 0.75, 1 g), temperature (55±1 oC, 120±1 oC, 130±1 oC, 140±1 oC) and time (3, 2, 1 min) to synthesize porous and flexible EDTA crosslinked guar films. The mechanism of crosslinking with EDTA is proposed for the first time. Detailed analysis of films has been achieved by NMR, SEM-EDX, FTIR, XRD, TGA. Further, the transdermal delivery of loaded curcumin within the best optimized crosslinked film has been studied. The kinetics of the curcumin release profile via the Korsmeyer-Peppas model demonstrated non-fickian diffusion controlled release mechanism (DCR) with a CPDR of 49.8±0.01% in 720 min. The antibacterial, antifungal and antioxidant results depict that synthesized bio-compatible crosslinked biomaterial has potential utility in controlled and sustained drug delivery apart from other biomedical applications such as TDDS, wound healing etc.