Novel hydrogel-based ocular drug delivery system for the treatment of conjunctivitis.

Purpose: Conventional dosage form like eye drops showed poor therapeutic response and also require frequent dosing. Therefore, developing the dosage form to deliver the drug to the target site without much loss of drug or without causing any systemic side effects is the challenging job for the researchers in pharmaceutical industries.

Objective: The main aim of the present work was to formulate and evaluate hydrogel-based drug delivery containing combination of neomycin sulphate and betamethasone sodium phosphate in order to provide prolonged release and also better bioavailability of drugs for the treatment of eye infections.

Methods: In this study, poloxamer 407 and chitosan at different concentrations were used as the gelling agents. The prepared formulations were evaluated for clarity, pH, drug content, gelling capacity, gelling temperature and in vitro drug release study.

Results: From the preliminary studies, F5 formulation was selected as an optimized formulation. The optimized formulation was further evaluated for ex vivo permeation study, sterility test, HET-CAM and ocular irritation testing using rabbits. Ocular irritation by HET-CAM assay showed that the formulated gel does not cause any irritation to the blood vessels. Draize irritation test was performed using rabbits and results showed that formulation was non-irritant to the eye.

Conclusion: The formulated hydrogel formulation can be used as an alternative to conventional ophthalmic eye drop formulation of drugs neomycin and betamethasone for the purpose of providing prolonged therapy for the treatment of conjunctivitis.