Description:
Recently the use of textiles in medical applications has gone far enough for treatment and
health care purposes. Biopolymers and other biomaterials can be used together to develop
wide range of materials including composites to serve the intended use. The most
promising advantages to be used in this area is biocompatibility i.e. their non-toxicity in
biological systems when applied internally, and far enough their comfortability and
flexibility with better performance. This may be compared with derived petrochemical
materials which have side effects to biological systems and further their complexity in
handling including disposability.
The most promising advantages of controlled drug release devices are; drug is released at
specific target, decrease drug concentration, reduce drug morphology change due to
biotransformation and releasing drug at specific rate for a specified period of use.
This study focused at developing and characterizing bioceramics-woven cotton fabric PLA
reinforced composite as a drug delivery device for biomedical application. The cotton
woven fabric of different pore sizes, (0.5 mm), (1 mm), and (1.5 mm) were developed
using cotton yarn of count 30 Tex in handloom machine. Bioceramic particles were loaded
with antibiotic (streptomycin sulfate) by using rotor vapor evaporator and followed by
embediment of loaded particles into the fabrics. Then, composites were developed by
dipping the embedded fabrics into the PLA solutions of different concentrations:
0.01mg/ml, 0.03mg/ml and 0.06mg/ml. The developed composites were characterized in
terms of mechanical and physical properties. The results showed that tensile strength varied proportional to the pore sizes of the fabric and concentration of polymer solution i.e. the lower the pore size the higher the mechanical strength and the higher the concentration of polymer the higher the mechanicalstrength. Dissolution study showed that, when pore size kept constant, drug release rate was decreased when polymer concentration was increased, this result suggested that the release rate is influenced by the polymer concentration. Degradation study showed that the composites was degraded by 2.33%, 4%, and 7.33% for 0.5 mm pore size specimen for 0.01g/ml, 0.03g/ml and 0.06g/ml concentration respectively after two weeks. Absorption study showed that at higher concentration of polymer only small amount of water could be absorbed by the composite. It was then concluded that, the developed composite can be used as drug delivery device for wound dressing application.