Natural gums and its pharmaceutical application

Sunil Goswami*, Dr. Sonali Naik

Abstract: Gums  are  widely  used  natural  excipients  for  conventional  and  novel  dosage  forms.  With  the increasing  interest  in  polymers  of  natural  origin,  the  pharmaceutical  world  has  compliance  to use most of them in the formulations. In recent years, there has been a tremendous development in natural products, which are needed to be used for a variety of purposes. Nature has provided us a wide variety of materials to help improves and sustains the health of all living things either directly or indirectly. These natural materials have advantages over synthetic ones since they are chemically inert, nontoxic, less expensive, biodegradable and widely available. They can also be modified  in  different  ways  to  obtain  tailor  made  materials  for  drug-delivery  systems  and  thus can  compete  with  the  available  synthetic  excipients.  Moreover,  the  tremendous  orientation  of Pharma  world  towards  these  naturally  derived  polymers  has  become  a  subject  of  increasing interest to discover, extract and purify such compounds  from the  natural origin. Gums  are the potent candidates to be used in various pharmaceutical formulations as a potential candidate for novel  drug  delivery  system  (NDDS).  In  this  review,  we  describe  the  developments  in  natural gums for use in the pharmaceutical sciences.

Keywords:  Natural  gum,  Natural  polymer,  Pharmaceutical  excipients,  Natural polysaccharide, NDDS.