| Abstract: | ![]()
Practically all low molecular weight surfactants show hemolytic activities. Aside of this serious disadvantage almost all low molecular weight solubilizers cause considerable side effects, particularly during or after parenteral application. Polymeric surfactants, however, usually show no or only very little hemolytic effects. They therefore are supposed not to be able to penetrate neither into cellular or erythrocyte walls nor into phospholipid bilayers, resp., similar bilayer membranes due to their large molecular size. Therefore no decay of biological bilayers should be expected with polymeric surfactants. The only pharmaceutically widely used polymeric surfactants are at the moment polyoxyethylene-polyoxypropylene block copolymers (poloxamers (INN), Pluronicsr̀ and Pluriolsr̀). Unfortunately they have only poor solubility capacities. In order to find better solubilizing polymeric surfactants, some water soluble dextran fatty acid esters (Ref. 1) were synthesized and tested with respect to their solubilisation capacity and hemolytic activity. Usually the hemolytic activity is tested by standard methods using purified animal or human erythrocyte suspensions. As erythrocytes also contain a relatively high amount of lactose dehydrogenase (LDH), we studied the suitability of the highly sensitive, and in the medical diagnostic well known LDH test, as a supplemental hemolytic determination method (Ref. 2). The advantage of this test is, that there is no need of the time consuming purification and standardization as it is required with the erythrocytes' suspension. It can be performed with original blood and without costly preparations at all. The synthesized dextran fatty acid esters proved themselves as very little hemolytic and, compared with the polyoxyethylene-polyoxypropylene block copolymers, they show improved solubilisation capacities. |
