Funding: This work was supported by Portuguese Agency for Innovation (PT2020) through the projects
(CENTRO-01-0145-FEDER-000014) and (POCI-01-0247-FEDER-017771). It was also supported by the project PAMI – Portuguese Additive Manufacturing Initiative (project nº22158 – SAICT- AAC nº 01/SAICT/2016) and also, by the CDRSP– ID/Multi/04044/2019, funded by the Portuguese Government through FCT/MCTES and co-funded by the European Regional Development Fund through the Partnership Agreement PT2020. This work was also supported by funds from the Health Sciences Research Center (CICS-UBI) through National Funds by FCT - Foundation for Science and Technology (UID / Multi / 00709/2019).Microparticulated drug delivery systems have been used as promising encapsulation systems for protecting drugs for in vitro and in vivo applications, enhancing its stability, providing an increased surface to volume ratio, reducing adverse effects, and hence an improvement in bioavailability. Among the studied microparticles, there is a rising interest in the research of alginate microparticles for pharmaceutical and biomedical fields confirming its potential to be used as an effective matrix for drug and cell delivery. Moreover, calcium alginate has been one of the most extensively forming microparticles in the presence of divalent cations providing prolonged
drug release and suitable mucoadhesive properties. Regarding the above mentioned, in this research
work, we intended to produce Ca-alginate micro-vehicles through electrospraying, presenting high encapsulation efficiency (EE%), reduced protein release across the time, reduced swelling effect,
and high sphericity coefficient. To quickly achieve these characteristics and to perform an optimal combination among the percentage of alginate and CaCl2, design of Experiments was applied. The obtained model presented to be statistically significant (p-value < 0.05), with a coefficient of determination of 0.9207, 0.9197, 0.9499, and 0.9637 for each output (EE%, release, swelling, and sphericity, respectively). Moreover, the optimal point (4% of alginate and 6.6% of CaCl2) was successfully validated.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio
