Overview of Bioactive Delivery Systems

Abstract

There has been great interest in the design, fabrication, and application of edible delivery systems to encapsulate, retain, protect, and release active agents over the past decade or so. A wide variety of different kinds of delivery systems have been assembled from food-grade ingredients, including microemulsions, nanoemulsions, emulsions, multiple emulsions, solid lipid nanoparticles, nanoliposomes, liposomes, biopolymer nanoparticles, and microgels. These delivery systems differ in the composition, dimensions, structural organization, surface chemistry, polarity, and electrical characteristics of the particles they contain, which means that they differ in their functional attributes. Ideally, it is important to be able to select the most appropriate delivery systems for a specific food application. This means that the delivery system should be formed using economic ingredients and processes, that it is robust enough to survive food processing, storage, and utilization, that it protects the encapsulated component, and that it retains/releases the encapsulated component under the desired conditions. One of the major drawbacks of much of the research in this area published in scientific literature is that the delivery systems are assembled from ingredients that are not acceptable in foods, using processing operations that are not economic or cannot easily be scaled up, or that have physicochemical or sensory attributes that are incompatible with food products. In this chapter, the “delivery by design” (DbD) concept is outlined as a rational approach to design and fabricate edible delivery systems that are more suitable for applications in commercial products.