Most hydrophobic drugs are usually very poorly soluble in water, resulting in they are hard to apply in clinical use. To overcome this problem, nanomaterials are used to encapsulate the hydrophobic drugs and then the surface is modified with hydrophilic substances to be used in the body. However, this process requires the use of cytotoxic organic solvents to produce emulsion, such as acetone, trichloromethane, dichloromethane, methylene chloride. It can reduce surface and interfacial tensions and suspend in the aqueous phase after emulsifying the oil into tiny oil beads, then loading into the drug. In this study, a nano-drug carrier consisting of Fe3O4 nanoparticles and alginate was prepared, and they are U.S. FDA-approved materials for human use. Due to the very poor water solubility of curcumin (0.6 µg/mL), curcumin was chosen as the hydrophobic drug in this study. A non-emulsification method was developed to directly encapsulate curcumin into alg-magnetic nanocomposite without the use of acetone, trichloromethane, and dichloromethane. The optimal conditions for encapsulation of curcumin by nanomaterials were determined by testing different curcumin/nanomaterial ratios, different mixing times, and different reagent doses. The experimental data showed that the solubility of curcumin was 0.6 µg/mL compared to only curcumin in water, while the solubility of curcumin was 10.995 µg/mL for the packaged seaweed alg-magnetic nanocomposite.
