Natural gums and its pharmaceutical application

Abstract

Gums are widely used natural excipients for conventional and novel dosage forms. With the increasing interest in polymers of natural origin, the pharmaceutical world has compliance to use most of them in the formulations. In recent years, there has been a tremendous development in natural products, which are needed to be used for a variety of purposes. Nature has provided us a wide variety of materials to help improves and sustains the health of all living things either directly or indirectly. 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. Moreover, the tremendous orientation of Pharma world towards these naturally derived polymers has become a subject of increasing interest to discover, extract and purify such compounds from the natural origin. Gums are the potent candidates to be used in various pharmaceutical formulations as a potential candidate for novel drug delivery system (NDDS). In this review, we describe the developments in natural gums for use in the pharmaceutical sciences.