Experimental and theoretical solubility advantage screening of bi-component solid curcumin formulations

Maciej Przybyłek; Łukasz Recki; Karina Mroczyńska; Tomasz Jeliński; Piotr Cysewski

doi:10.1016/j.jddst.2019.01.023

Experimental and theoretical solubility advantage screening of bi-component solid curcumin formulations

Abstrakt

A comprehensive experimental and theoretical screening was performed for identification of curcumin solubilizers. Experimental data led to formulation of a non-linear QSPR model correlating molecular descriptors with measured solubilities. The majority of synthesized binary systems exhibited a moderate enhancement of curcumin solubility, which was found to be the highest in the case of curcumin cocrystallized with pyrogallol. New excipients for curcumin were found by utilization of the model within its applicability domain. It appears that a five-fold rise of curcumin solubility is the upper limit for this kind of formulations what was inferred from the screened 230 thousand compounds. Finally, theoretical analysis was extended on naturally occurring curcumin analogues, including demethoxycurcumin, bisdemethoxycurcumin, α-, β- and Ar-turmerones. In all cases, a list of coformers suitable for binary solids preparation with potential enhanced solubility was obtained. They can be treated as first choice lists for further experimental exploration of solubility enhancement of curcumin and its analogues.