14 DAY TRIAL // Agave seems to mean more than tequila.
A Mexican team from the University of Guadalajara has found that the blue agave, the plant from whose sap tequila is made, could offer a more effective way of delivering drugs to the colon than common drug-carriers.
The research could improve treatments for ulcerative colitis, irritable bowel syndrome, cancer, Crohn's disease and other colon conditions.
Drug delivery to the colon is very tricky as many are broken down by stomach acids before they've had a chance to get to the intestine, where they can be absorbed.
Researchers have tried to solve this issue by locating drugs into carrier molecules that resist to the passing through the stomach but a suitable carrier compound has still not been found.
But the tequila compound, a type of polysaccharides (like starch) named fructans, polymers of the fructose (starches are polymers of the glucose), can be just the right stuff.
Fructans were shaped by the Mexican team into tiny microspheres that can carry existing drugs that are employed to treat colon diseases. "Because the compounds resist destruction in the stomach, they could allow more of the drugs to reach the colon intact and improve their effectiveness, the researchers say. This study shows that the agave fruit is good for more than just tequila. It also has medicinal value," says study leader Dr. Guillermo Toriz, an assistant professor at the university.
"Agave fructan is the ideal natural carrier of drugs for the colon."
Researchers have supposed for some time that fructans are resistant to acid attack and could be a useful drug delivery vehicle but very few plant sources, like ripe agave fruit, contain fructans in large levels (till 80 % in this case).
The Mexican team changed chemically the fructan to allow drugs to be encapsulated, guarding the them from the action of the stomach acids. The fructan microspheres were filled with ibuprofen.
The ibuprofen-filled microspheres were exposed to hydrochloric acid for an hour and resulted to be physically intact when examined microscopically.
The team is currently looking for improving the durability of the fructans and will start tests on animals, a step towards their employment on humans in the future.