Sustainable Chemistry and Pharmacy 18 (2020) 100325 Available online 11 September 2020 2352-5541/© 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Fabrication and evaluation of pH-sensitive biocompatible microwave irradiated moringa barkgum-carrageenan (MOG-CRG-IPN) interpenetrating isotropic polymeric network for controlled delivery of pharmaceuticals Debjani Roy , Trishna Bal * , Sabyasachi Swain Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences and Technology, Birla Institute of Technology, Mesra, Ranchi, 835215, India A R T I C L E INFO Keywords: Moringa bark gum (MOG) Carageenan(CRG) Microwave irradiation Controlled release ABSTRACT In the present research, pH-sensitive interpenetrating polymeric network are prepared by interpenetration of two natural polysaccharides Moringa bark gum(MOG) and Carrageenan (CRG) by use of microwave irradiation as interpenetrating polymeric network (IPN) and characterized using fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), x-ray diffraction (XRD), thermogravimetric studies (TGA) and 13C nuclear magnetic resonance (13C NMR) and the surface topography, indepth pore size as well as the interior architecture of the material were confrmed by scanning electron microscopy(SEM) and atomic force microscopy (AFM).The contact angle mea- surement by optical contact angle (OCA) indicated that the increase in MOG content increased the water retention capacity thereby maintaining the structural integrity of the polymeric network. The pH sensitivity at pH 2,7.4 & 9.2 and swelling studies helped in optimizing the best grade F7.The swelling kinetics of F7 followed second order kinetics. The biodegradability studies were done using soil burial method.The drug release from F7 was found to 88.17% for 8 h interval. The material proved to be hemocompatible. These studies indicated that MOG-CRG-IPN (F7) can be effectively used as an effcient controlled delivery device and can be explored as biomaterial. 1. Introduction Stimuli sensitive interpenetrating polymeric network systems(IPNs) are gaining importance as effcient drug delivery device (Wells and Harris, 2019) as well as polymeric scaffolds. An interpenetrating poly- mer network is a system of more than one polymer where at least one polymer is crosslinked in the immediate presence of other polymer (Zhao, 2012), thereby retaining the individual characteristics of the polymers used in the process.Various natural polymers along with combinations of synthetic polymers are used for the preparation of IPN (Wells and Harris, 2019; Swain and Bal, 2019a). Moringa Bark Gum (MOG) obtained from the bark of Moringa oleifera is a reddish brown polysaccharide having very good swelling properties due to presence of numerous hydroxyl groups on the polymer backbone and consists of arabinose, galactose and glucoronic acid in the ratio of 10:7:2 (Panda et al., 2006), whereas Carrageenan (CRG), obtained from red sea weed is an important natural polysaccharide due to its thickening, emulsifying as well as thermo-reversible gelling properties having higher molecular weight with a curly-helical structure in which 3,6-anhydrogalactose and are attached with D-galactose by α-1,3 and β-1,4 glycoside linkage and through crosslinking a double helix structure can be formed due to the presence of sulfate group in the spiral chains of CRG (Swain and Bal, 2019a).The blend of CRG with MOG aided by microwave irradiation facilitates the crosslinks between MOG and CRG by virtue of hydrogen bond formation between sulfate groups of CRG and the hydroxyl groups of MOG thus forming a double helical structure by helic entanglement. Due to this formation of double helix within the crosslinked polymer blend, the swelling property of the MOG-CRG-IPN system is also enhanced which is an most important property for drug loading (Swain and Bal, 2019a). In the feld of tissue engineering also, such IPN plays a signifcant role as scaffold which is already studied earlier (Swain and Bal, 2019b), for wound repair (Dhandayuthapani and YoshidaTor- uMaekawa, 2011), burn, accidents or severe trauma, where the tissue grows on the polymeric backbone leaving the site of injury without any scars.These materials as scaffolds can mimic the extracellular matrix, thereby provoking the cells to adapt to proliferation and differentiaton (Malafaya et al., 2007). The combination of CRG and MOG is unexplored and no where in literature this combination has been applied for drug * Corresponding author. E-mail address: trishna.bal@gmail.com (T. Bal). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Sustainable Chemistry and Pharmacy journal homepage: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/scp https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scp.2020.100325 Received 1 June 2020; Received in revised form 29 August 2020; Accepted 29 August 2020