Mucilage: A Rich Source of Excipients Present in Plant Parts with Gold Status

Abstract

Large numbers of pharmaceutical excipients of natural origin are available nowadays. Plant materials like mucilages with a variety of pharmaceutical applications are most common. They are being used due to their abundance, safety, compatibility, cost-effectiveness and eco-friendly nature as compared to synthetic one and have various advantages over synthetic polymers. To compete with and replace artificial excipients mucilages can be modified in many ways to obtain the required form of a drug delivery system. Currently, there are a vast amount of natural pharmaceutical excipients are there, and due to its increasing demand, it has become essential to identify or explore more plant mucilage sources to fulfil the industrial need. Mucilages are polymeric mono-saccharides or mixed mono-saccharides combined with uronic acids. On hydrolysis, they yield a mixture of sugars and uronic acids, and the mucilages that are obtained from plant sources have translucent and amorphous nature. Due to presence of hydrophilic moieties in mucilages, they can easily combine with water to form a gel or a thick viscous solution, and these extracted mucilages from the plant can be processed to a certain extent and incorporated in dosage forms to achieve the specific performance of the formulation. In this review, we describe isolation, characterization, pharmaceutical application and methods of modification to develop drug delivery systems.