292: Gastrointestinal Fate of Turmeric-Derived Nanoparticles and Enhanced Bioavailability of Curcumin

Introduction

Curcumin shows great promise for preventing and treating chronic diseases due to its anti-inflammatory, anticancer, and antidiabetic properties. However, its low water solubility and poor bioavailability limit its practical application in food and pharmaceutical industries. Recently, the synthesis of curcumin-loaded nanoparticles derived from turmeric can significantly enhance the water solubility of curcumin, due to structural change. This study systematically investigated the gastrointestinal fate of curcumin-loaded nanoparticles, in particular whether it can enhance the stability and bioaccessibility curcumin.

Methods

The turmeric-derived curcumin nanoparticles were first synthesized by a pH-based method, where turmeric powder was treated with NaOH solution (pH 13) to solubilize phenolic compounds, followed by acidification with HCl to pH 7. We also selected different curcumin-loaded systems (such as curcumin crystals, turmeric-derived curcumin nanoparticles (TurNPs), also their mixture with nanoemulsion as a food system). After that, the standardized INFOGEST in vitro digestion model was used to examine the gastrointestinal fate of these samples, in three gastrointestinal phases. Particle size, zeta potential, and microstructure were characterized using Mastersizer, Zetasizer, and confocal fluorescence microscopy, respectively.

Results

As a result, we clearly observed that the curcumin crystals are insoluble in all gastrointestinal phases, while TurNPs tend to aggregate when going through the stomach phase, due to the change of pH from 7 to 3. However, TurNPs still showed a higher gastrointestinal stability (76% ± 8%), which was 1.6 times higher than that of curcumin crystal. The bioaccessibility of TurNPs reached 66.8% ± 2.5%, an 8-fold increase compared to curcumin crystal. Importantly, we found that incorporating them into a nanoemuslion food system, the stability of TurNPs reached 93.9% ± 6.3%, which is the highest among all tested samples, while bioaccessibility was increased to 82.9% ± 3.4%, 5.2 times higher than curcumin crystal-added nanoemulsion system.

Significance

The findings show that the use of turmeric-derived nanoparticles can not only improve the water solubility of curcumin, but also enhance the gastrointestinal stability and bioavailability of curcumin, in particular by the mixture of an emulsion-like food system. This implies the potential of TurNPs for improved functional delivery of curcumin in food and nutrition systems.

Authors: Minghe Wang, Xiping Gong, Hualu Zhou