Received: July 02, 2019 Accepted: July 05, 2019 Published: July 05, 2019
Nanoemusions are ultrafine emulsions in the appearance of clear or milky oil-in-water (o/w), water-in-oil (w/o) or bi-continuous droplets having a droplet diameter considered to be in the range of 100 to 500 nm. Nanoemulsions containing water as an aqueous phase, oleic acid as oil phase, and span 80 and glycerol as surfactant/cosurfactant were formulated and used to load 1.77mM of tamoxifen citrate by ultrasonication method. Pseudoternary phase diagram was used to choose the ratios of the water, oil and the surfactant/cosurfactant used in the experiment. The significance of the enhanced transdermal penetration of tamoxifen citrate was determined by student t-test. Adopting the probability value of P smaller than 0.05 as the statistically significant difference in the result interpretation, the values of P for the comparison between the control and direct administration of 1µM of tamoxifen and 0.01pM of tamoxifen were 0.089 and 0.29 respectively while the values for the comparison between the control and 0.53mM of tamoxifen-loaded nanoemulsion sonicated for 10 minutes and 0.53mM of tamoxifen-loaded nanoemulsion sonicated for 30 minutes were 0.024 and 0.0064 respectively. On the other hand, the value of P for the comparison between the 0.53mM of tamoxifen-loaded nanoemulsion sonicated for 10 minutes and 0.53mM of tamoxifen-loaded nanoemulsion sonicated for 30 minutes was 0.00036. The study shows that nanoemulsion formulations administered intradermally were more efficient in in vitro cytotoxicity than tamoxifen administered directly in the cells. Also, the experimental data indicate that duration of sonication can affect the droplet size and the drug penetration across the stratum corneum. Therefore, intradermal application of tamoxifen formulated into nanoemulsion can be used as an alternative to the traditional oral administration in the treatment of estrogen receptor positive breast cancer.
Key words: Nanoemulsion, Tamoxifen, Breast cancer, Intradermal, Cytotoxicity