Preparation, characterization and in silico modeling of biodegradable nanoparticles containing cyclosporine A and coenzyme Q10

Combination therapy will soon become a reality, particularly for those patients requiring poly-therapy to treat co-existing disease states. This becomes all the more important with the increasing cost, time and complexity of the drug discovery process prompting one to look at new delivery systems to increase the efficacy, safety and patient compliance of existing drugs. Along this line, we attempted to design nano-scale systems for simultaneous encapsulation of cyclosporine A (CsA) and coenzyme Q10 (CoQ10) and model their encapsulation and release kinetics. The in vitro characterization of the co-encapsulated nanoparticles revealed that the surfactant nature, concentration, external phase volume, droplet size reduction method and drug loading concentration can all influence the overall performance of the nanoparticles. The semi-quantitative solubility study indicates the strong influence of CoQ10 on CsA entrapment which was thought to be due to an increase in the lipophilicity of the overall system. The in vitro dissolution profile indicates the influence of CoQ10 on CsA release (64%) to that of individual particles of CsA, where the release is faster and higher (86%) on 18th day. The attempts to model the encapsulation and release kinetics were successful, offering a possibility to use such models leading to high throughput screening of drugs and their nature, alone or in combination for a particular polymer, if chi-parameters are understood.