Luca Protti, Vivien Nagy, Sankar Rathinam, Amin Amani and Már Másson
Introduction: Chitosan is a natural biodegradable, biocompatible, and nontoxic polysaccharide that can be useful in various fields of biomedicine and is particularly characterized by antimicrobial activity. Despite this, however, chitosan presents problems in its use, but through chemical modification it is possible to avoid these problems by improving its characteristics.
Methods: An important chitosan derivative is N-(2-(N,N,N-Trimethyl-ammoniumyl)acetyl)-chitosan (TAC), which has major characteristics such as solubility and also antimicrobial activity.
The purpose of the research was to optimize the reaction of obtaining a fully substituted TAC and subsequently use it as a carrier for ciprofloxacin drug conjugation and in the creation of nanoparticles of polyelectrolyte complexes, which were subsequently tested through antimicrobial assays.
Results: Optimization of the reaction was carried out through the Design of Experiment (DOE), by which the most important factors within the reaction and the optimal reactant conditions in terms of equivalents were identified in order to achieve complete substitution.
Conclusions: In this research, a new quantitative and one-pot method was developed for the synthesis of TAC with a good degree of substitution.
