Rodel D. Guerrero^1,*,, Paul WS Heng^2, and Terence P. Tumolva^3,

¹Department of Chemical Engineering and Technology, MSU-Iligan Institute of Technology, 9200 Iligan City, Philippines

²GEA-NUS Pharmaceutical Processing Research Laboratory, Department of Pharmacy, National University of Singapore, 18 Science Drive 4, 117543 Singapore

³Green Materials Laboratory, Department of Chemical Engineering, University of the Philippines Diliman, 1101 Quezon City, Philippines

*Corresponding author: Tel: +63 927 5526542; E-mail: rodel.guerrero@g.msuiit.edu.ph

Considering how much protein is loaded into the process, the crosslinking solution concentration and the weight percentage of the alginate/hydroxyethyl cellulose coating material, this study presented the details of optimization of the microencapsulation process. Optimization was done with an objective of maximizing the encapsulation efficiency of the microparticle fabricated using external ionotropic gelation method. Results showed that the process is capable of achieving around 75% encapsulation efficiency when protein loading is around 15 wt%, alginate/hydroxyethyl cellulos is about 2 wt% and the CaCl₂ solution should be 3 wt%. This was done using Box-Behnken methodology wherein the predicted model was found to have good predictive capability. Analysis also showed that the process is affected by how much protein drug is loaded into the system and the interactions between crosslinking solution concentration with bovine serum albumin (BSA) loading as well as the strong relationship between alginate/hydroxyethyl cellulos concentration with itself.

Microencapsulation, Protein, Alginate, Cellulose, Ionotropic gelation.