The effect of sodium alginate of osmotic pellet on drug release

Osmotic pellet, which consisted of water-swellable seed layer, drug layer, and porous membrane layer, has been widely utilized in oral drug delivery system. In this work, we describe the preparation of osmotic pellet with nifedipine as model drug and a mixture of cellulose acetate (CA) and Eudragit RS as membrane layer, and then examined the drug release behavior on the variation of the thickness change of membrane layer (CA and Eudragit RS) and release media. Furthermore, we examined the nifedipine release behavior using sodium alginate as a potential membrane candidate. Osmotic pellet was obtained in the quantitative yield by fluidized bed coater. Osmotic pellet exhibited the round morphology and the size ranging 1500∼1700 μm in SEM. The nifedipine release decreased as the thickness of membrane layer (CA and Eudragit RS) increased. In addition, it observed that there is difference of release amount in between intestinal juice (pH 6.8) and gastric juice (pH 1.2). In the case of osmotic pellet coated with sodium alginate, nifedipine release behavior depended on the crosslinking of sodium alginate layer. In conclusion, we found that various membrane layers could control the release amount of nifedipine.