Starch in drug delivery

Abstract

In the last few years, materials from renewable biomass in drug delivery have received considerable attention. Starch is an abundant, eco-friendly, biodegradable polysaccharide with great possibility of being scaled to an industrial level. Because there are several ways in which starch can be physically processed as annealing, dry heating, heat-moisture and ultrasonic treatment resulting in a very interesting versatility in scaling processes. Moreover, the starch derivatives result in versatile derivatives that are capable of interacting with different drugs. In this sense, starch can be hydrolyzed, esterified, grafted, oxidized which allows it to be used in different biological applications. In this chapter summarizes the last relevance advances with starch, such as microspheres, hydrogels, nanocrystals, films, nanoparticles and their uses such as transdermal drug delivery, release of anticancer drugs, antibacterial hydrogel, colon diseases and their potential applications as drug delivery.