Conjugation of curcumin onto hyaluronic acid enhances its aqueous solubility and stability

Polymer-drug conjugates have gained much attention largely to circumvent lower drug solubility and to enhance drug stability. Curcumin is widely known for its medicinal properties including its anticancer efficacy. One of the serious drawbacks of curcumin is its poor water solubility which leads to reduced bio-availability. With a view to address these issues, we synthesized hyaluronic acid-curcumin (HA-Cur) conjugate. The drug conjugate was characterized using FT-IR, NMR, Dynamic light scattering and TEM techniques. The conjugates, interestingly found to assembles as micelles in aqueous phase. The formation of micelles seems to improve the stability of the drug in phisiological pH. We also assessed cytotoxicty of the conjugate using L929 fibroblast cells and quantified by MTT assay. (c) 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.