Validation and testing of a new artificial biomimetic barrier for estimation of transdermal drug absorption

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Human skin remains the most reliable model for studying the transdermal permeation of active compounds. Due to the limited source, porcine skin has been used extensively for performing penetration tests. Performing penetration studies by using human and animal skin, however, would also involve a series of ethical issues and restrictions. For these reasons, new biomimetic artificial barriers are being developed as possible alternatives for transdermal testing. If appropriately optimized, such products can be cost-effective, easily standardized across laboratories, precisely controlled in specific experimental conditions, or even present additional properties compared to the human and animal skin models such as negligible variability between replicates. In this current work we use the skin mimicking barrier (SMB) for drug permeability tests. The aim was to evaluate the suitability of the new barrier for studying the percutaneous absorption of the lipophilic extract of the plant Zingiber officinale Roscoe in vitro and compare its permeability ability with the artificial membrane Permeapad® and porcine skin. Our results showed that the permeability values obtained through the SMB are comparable are comparable to those obtained by using the porcine skin, suggesting that the new barrier may be an acceptable in vitro model for conducting percutaneous penetration experiments.