Preliminary evaluation of molecular imprinting of 5-fluorouracil within hydrogels for use as drug delivery systems

Molecular imprinting is a new and rapidly evolving technique used to create synthetic receptors and it possesses great potential in a number of applications in the life sciences. Keeping in mind the therapeutic importance of 5-fluorouracil (5-FU) and the technological significance of molecular imprinting polymers, the present study is an attempt to synthesize 2-hydroxyethylmetacrylate- and acrylic acid-based 5-FU imprinted hydrogels. For the synthesis of these hydrogels, N,N′-methylenebisacrylamide was used as a crosslinker, ammonium persulfate as an initiator and N,N,N′,N′-tetramethylethylenediamine as an accelerator. Both molecular imprinted polymers (MIPs) and non-imprinted polymers were synthesized at the optimum crosslinker concentration obtained from swelling studies and used to study their recognition affinity, their swelling and the in vitro release dynamics of the drug. It was observed from this study that the recognition affinity of MIPs is increased when these are synthesized in a high concentration template solution.