Abstract

Nature has provided us a wide variety of materials to help improve and sustain the health of all living things either directly or indirectly. In recent years there have been important developments in different dosage forms for existing and newly designed drugs and natural products, and semi-synthetic as well as synthetic excipients often need to be used for a variety of purposes. Gums and mucilages are widely used natural materials for conventional and novel dosage forms. These natural materials have advantages over synthetic ones since they are chemically inert, nontoxic, less expensive, biodegradable and widely available. They can also be modified in different ways to obtain tailor-made materials for drug delivery systems and thus can compete with the available synthetic excipients. In this review, we describe the developments in natural gums and mucilages for use in the pharmaceutical sciences.



Keywords:  Natural polysaccharide   Natural gum   Pharmaceutical application