Production and simulated digestion of high-load beads containing Schizochytrium oil encapsulated utilizing prilling technique.

The oil from the heterotroph Schizochytrium is a rich source of n-3 PUFA, particularly DHA, and therefore highly susceptible to oxidation. The present work reports the first application of coaxial prilling for the protection of this oil through microencapsulation. After process optimization, core-shell microparticles were produced with calcium or zinc alginate at different concentrations. Encapsulates were analyzed in their tocopherol and PUFA content. Prilling lowered the earlier but had little effect on the latter. Microcapsules coated with calcium alginate (1 % and 1.75 %) had higher oil load and encapsulation efficiency and were therefore submitted to in vitro digestion together with a simulated meal. Digesta were also analyzed with HPLC-qTOF and 1H NMR and compared to undigested encapsulates. While 1 % calcium shell granted lower oil release and protection from oxidation in the simulated gastrointestinal tract, chromatographic and spectroscopic data of digesta showed higher presence of lipid digestion products.

Hollow Particles Obtained by Prilling and Supercritical Drying as a Potential Conformable Dressing for Chronic Wounds.

The production of aerogels for different applications has been widely known, but the use of polysaccharide-based aerogels for pharmaceutical applications, specifically as drug carriers for wound healing, is being recently explored. The main focus of this work is the production and characterization of drug-loaded aerogel capsules through prilling in tandem with supercritical extraction. In particular, drug-loaded particles were produced by a recently developed inverse gelation method through prilling in a coaxial configuration. Particles were loaded with ketoprofen lysinate, which was used as a model drug. The core-shell particles manufactured by prilling were subjected to a supercritical drying process with CO2 that led to capsules formed by a wide hollow cavity and a tunable thin aerogel layer (40 µm) made of alginate, which presented good textural properties in terms of porosity (89.9% and 95.3%) and a surface area up to 417.0 m2/g. Such properties allowed the hollow aerogel particles to absorb a high amount of wound fluid moving very quickly (less than 30 s) into a conformable hydrogel in the wound cavity, prolonging drug release (till 72 h) due to the in situ formed hydrogel that acted as a barrier to drug diffusion.