Fibrin-based drug delivery systems. II. The preparation and characterization of microbeads

An emulsion method was employed to prepare fibrin beads having different sizes in this study. The oil phase of emulsion system was consisted of mineral oil with various amount of oleic acid as surfactant. Fibrin was converted from fibrinogen with thrombin in Tris buffer solution, then the mixture was emulsified into the oil phase forming droplets. After curing for one hour, 400 ul of glutaraldehyde solution (0.5% v/v) was added to minimize coagulation. The recovery of fibrin beads was simply done by decanting the oil phase and washing the residual with diethyl ether once and then with a mixture of isopropanol and n-hexane (1:3) containing 0.2% w/v Tween 80 twice. As expected, increasing the amount of oleic acid in the oil phase decreased the size of fibrin beads. It is due to the decrease of interfacial tension with increasing oleic acid amount. The presence of macromolecules showed no interference on the formation of fibrin beads except lysozyme. The diffusion characteristics of fibrin beads was evaluated using macromolecules of different molecular weight as model. The size of fibrin beads affected the penetration rate, whereas the effect of molecular weight of macromolecules was inconclusive. An exponential equation was able to approximate the penetration of macromolecules into fibrin beads during the late-time period. The possibility of using fibrin beads as the carrier to deliver protein drugs was appreciated.