Jiyoung Seo
Ajou University, South Korea
Title: Hyaluronic acid hydrogel as drug carrier for rheumatoid arthritis treatment
Biography
Biography: Jiyoung Seo
Abstract
Patients with rheumatoid arthritis-related diseases show an increasing trend. Although many drugs for rheumatoid arthritis (RA) have been appeared in the market, the drugs have some disadvantages; short half-life in vivo, inconvenience of taking drugs for a long period of time, and drug toxicity in oral administration. Thus, a study of formulations that can continuously release the drug is being required. Recently, injectable drug carriers into the joints as a treatment for RA has been suggested as a very effective treatment. Therefore, in this study, we have developed the effective drug carrier via hyaluronic acid (HA), which has a high bioavailability, for RA treatment.
The cross-linking agent was introduced into HA having a molecular weight of 1,000,000 to improve the physical properties of the HA hydrogel and control the pore size of each HA hydrogel for continuous drug release. We also investigated cell viability and inflammation test by using alamar blue assay and enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) about RAW264.7 cells and SW 982 cells. By near-infrared (NIR) fluorescence imaging, we confirmed the local release of NIR from the depot injected into the articular joint over an extended period. The effect of HA hydrogel as a RA drug delivery depot was evaluated in vivo experiments through extraction and staining over 1 week, 3 weeks, and 6 weeks.
Collectively, these results indicated that the drug depot formed after intra-articular injection of methotrexate-loaded-crosslinked HA hydrogel induced long-lasting drug release and allowed to result in enhanced RA repair.