An artificial liposome membrane system has been employed for in vitro screening of the human absorption of biologically active molecules for applications in nutrition and drug treatments. Initial work with molecules having small permeabilities demonstrated that they could not be measured using the technique since they were absorbed by the membrane. A critical innovation was to pre-treat the membrane by equilibrating it with the molecule of interest since this avoids the absorption problem but required more complex data analysis. Bioactive molecules with strong antioxidant and anti-cancer activity extracted from green tea showed a strong affinity to the membrane, which suggests that this significantly limits bioavailability. Ethanol but not dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) was found to enhance the diffusion of paracetamol, theophylline, acyclovir, nadolol and amphotericin B. The potential synergistic effect on the diffusion of paracetamol in the presence of caffeine was investigated but it was shown to have a detrimental effect. Finally, an effective protection of Epigallocatechin-3-gallate (EGCG) from the environment was achieved by the preparation of beeswax microspheres as a carrier.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:567761 |
| Date | January 2013 |
| Creators | Zhang, Yulan |
| Publisher | University of Birmingham |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://etheses.bham.ac.uk//id/eprint/3982/ |
Page generated in 0.0013 seconds