Isolation and Evaluation of Basella alba Linn. Leaf Mucilage as Release Retardant in Tablet Formulation

In recent years, plant derived polymers have evoked tremendous interest due to their diverse pharmaceutical applications such as diluent, binder, disintegrate in tablets, thickeners in oral liquids, protective colloids in suspensions, gelling agents in gels and bases in suppository, they are also used in cosmetics, textiles, paints and paper-making. Basella alba is a wildly cultivated, cool season vegetable with climbing growth habit. Malabar spinach is high in vitamin A, vitamin C, iron and calcium. In the present work, an attempt was made to develop matrix tablets of diclofenac using natural release retardant isolated from Basella alba leaves and its efficiency was compared with most widely used natural release retardant like guar gum.

Diclofenac matrix tablets were formulated by using BAM in different concentrations (2.5%, 5%, 7.5%, 10% and 12.5%) by wet granulation method and its efficiency was compared with guar gum. The granules prepared were free flowing with good compressibility. Formulated tablets were evaluated for hardness, thickness, friability, weight variation, drug content, in vitro disintegration time, swelling studies and in vitro dissolution studies.

The hardness of the tablets was found to be 6-7 kg/cm2 and percentage friability of tablets was found to be less than 0.1% in all the cases and swelling index studies shown that as the conc. of polymer increased there was a proportional increase in the swelling index of tablet. Among the formulation studied, formulation F5 showed release of drug more than 12hrs and formulation F5 showed optimum release characteristics. The release was found to follow the anomalous non-Fickian diffusion. It revealed that as the conc. of polymer in tablet increased the release of the drug from the tablet decreased. It shown that BAM exhibited excellent retarding effect on drug release from the matrix tablets even at very low concentrations. Stability studies were carried out at 400C±20C/75%±5% RH for formulation F5 for 30 days. The results of stability studies indicated no significant changes with respect to physicochemical properties, in vitro disintegration time, swelling index and in vitro drug release.