Have you ever mixed vinegar and baking soda? The result is a fizzy foam that effervesces as the acid and base combine and release carbon dioxide gas.
As well as being a fun kitchen experiment, combining an acid and base to make a carbon-dioxide-emitting foam could also have potential in medicine, particularly to deliver therapeutic drugs in the gut.
Researchers at CÚRAM recently tested a foam developed by scientists in Belgium that could be placed directly into the colon, with a view to delivering medicines to calm inflammatory bowel disease, or IBD.
People with IBD have either ulcerative colitis or Crohn’s disease, and experience painful flares of inflammation in the large intestine.
“For people with moderate to severe inflammatory bowel disease, antibody-based drugs or biologics can be an effective treatment, but the difficulty is in getting the drugs to where they are needed in the colon area and in the colon wall,” explains CÚRAM Principal Investigator Professor David Brayden, who is Full Professor of Advanced Drug Delivery at University College Dublin School of Veterinary Medicine and Conway Institute.
As part of a collaboration with Dr Ana Beloqui at the Catholic University of Louvain, Professor Brayden’s lab explored a potential new way of delivering biologic drugs directly into the gut via a specially designed foam that combines an acid (citric acid) with a base (potassium bicarbonate).
“Our colleagues in the University of Louvain developed this foam to see if it could effectively be loaded with biologic drugs and placed into the colon to deliver the medication in situ,” explains Professor Brayden.
In UCD, Dr Fiona McCartney in the Brayden lab explored how different elements of the foam affected its capability to deliver drugs into and across isolated colon tissue in lab models.
The research showed that a mild detergent in the foam helped make the gut more permeable for the biologic drug, while gelatin in the foam helped to secure it in the colon for longer.
But one of the most surprising findings of the overall study, according to Professor Brayden, is that the carbon dioxide produced by the foam appears to enhance the uptake of the medication into the gut wall.
“This is something that hasn’t been described before, and it shows that carbon dioxide could be a potential factor for improving the drug absorption in the large intestine,” he says.
The foam is now being further developed at the University of Louvain to optimise its capabilities as a drug-delivery platform and two drug molecules have been tested successfully in pre-clinical models so far.
You can read the full paper here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0168365924005625?via%3Dihub
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