Review of Micrencapsulation: A Review A Novel Approach in Drug Delivery

Abstract

Microencapsulation is the enveloping of liquid droplets or fine solid particles to form microcapsule, having an average diameter as small as 1 μm to several hundred micrometers. Microencapsulation technology is of interest to a wide range of industries, including pharmaceutical, food, agricultural, biotechnological, cosmetic and other industries with various significant advantages, including: (i) an effective protection of the encapsulated active ingredient against degradation, (ii) the possibility to control the release rate of the active ingredient. This review paper will address the historical background of microencapsulation technology, commonly used microencapsulation methods with its advantages and disadvantages and its applications in pharmaceutical, food, agricultural, biotechnological and cosmetic field. It also focuses on the influence of process parameters, residual solvent and cross linking agents as described in the scientific journal and patent literature. Microencapsulation methods are divided into two basic groups, namely chemical and physical. Each method has its own advantages as well as disadvantages. However most of the commonly used methods have several disadvantages such as unfavorable conditions for the core material, complexity in procedure and low encapsulation efficiency. The results indicate that the number of process variables that should be optimized during core material encapsulation. The dependence so many process variables may become a problem in terms of reproducibility and scale-up process. Based on the existing results and authors ’reflection, this review gives rise to reasoning and suggested choices of process parameters and microencapsulation procedure.