Desenvolvimento de sistemas de liberação controlada de um extrato fúngico a partir de variados polímeros para aplicações em medicina veterinária

Abstract

The cattle industry is one of the main activities developed in Brazil, and its importance is reflected in the country economic and social development. This activity is responsible for developing jobs which come from the farm (production of cattle for beef or dairy) until the high technology industry of dairy products. Because of this, the factors which affect its productivity are extremely important. One factor that influences its production is the occurrence of diseases or nutritional deficiencies, which can be solved using drugs or food supplements; however, the application of these drugs becomes difficult and expensive due to the need for frequent handling of the herd. One way of circumventing this difficulty is the use of controlled delivery systems. These systems can be designed in different ways; one of those ways is the use of biodegradable and biocompatible polymers as a matrix for drug release. Therefore, this work presents the study of the physical and chemical stability of both polymers, chitosan and poly(-caprolactone), in the ruminal environment in order to examine their use as a matrix for delivery systems. To evaluate the stability of polymers it has been used vibrational techniques (infrared absorption and Raman), thermogravimetric (TG and DSC) as well as electronic spectroscopy. In a second step this work involves the construction of delivery systems using these polymers and calcium polyphoshate coacervate to produce a blend in order to release a fungal extract between 8 and 12 hours. At the end of the study it has been shown the great stability of the PCL polymer, which was used to build a delivery system, already chitosan has showed a low chemical stability and therefore it was not use to build system delivery. The devices constructed from PCL and coacervate showed to be versatile can generate different release rates depending on the ratio between its constituents, their shape and surface area.