De Marco Iolanda
Department of Industrial Engineering, University of Salerno, Via Giovanni Paolo II, 132, 84084 Fisciano, Salerno, Italy.
Polymers (Basel). 2022 May 27;14(11):2172. doi: 10.3390/polym14112172.
Zein is a natural, biocompatible, and biodegradable polymer widely used in the pharmaceutical, biomedical, and packaging fields because of its low water vapor permeability, antibacterial activity, and hydrophobicity. It is a vegetal protein extracted from renewable resources (it is the major storage protein from corn). There has been growing attention to producing zein-based drug delivery systems in the recent years. Being a hydrophobic biopolymer, it is used in the controlled and targeted delivery of active principles. This review examines the present-day landscape of zein-based microparticles and nanoparticles, focusing on the different techniques used to obtain particles, the optimization of process parameters, advantages, disadvantages, and final applications.
Polymers (Basel). 2022-5-27
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