Encapsulation of Curcumin in Pluronic Block Copolymer Micelles for Drug Delivery Applications

We report here the potential of Pluronic tri-block copolymer micelles for the formulation of curcumin, a natural dietary compound having great therapeutic potential against many diseases including cancer. Two most commonly used Pluronic F127 and F68 were used for the formulation and analyzed for curcumin encapsulation efficiency and stability. The encapsulation of drug in micelle was highly dependent on drug-to-copolymer ratio. Pluronic F127 showed better encapsulation efficiency than Pluronic F68. In vitro release profile demonstrated slower and sustained release of curcumin from Pluronic micelles. The lyophilized form of the formulations exhibited good stability for long-term storage. The physical interaction of curcumin with Pluronic was evident by XRD analysis, UV-visible, fluorescence, and FT-IR spectroscopy. AFM study showed that the drug-encapsulated micelles were spherical in shape with diameters below 100 nm. The in vitro cytotoxicity of the drug formulations was investigated with HeLa cancer cells. Pluronic-encapsulated curcumin showed comparable anticancer activity with free curcumin.