Synthesis, characterization and antibacterial activity of tetracycline loaded alginate-based hydrogel for drug delivery and artificial neural network modelling study

Chemical and physically crosslinked hydrogels, as pharmaceutical carrier compounds with antibacterial and sustained release features, hold high potential for clinical uses. In this study, synthesized biodegradable tetracycline drug-loaded hydrogels were used to treat bacterial infections with the aim of controlling systemic side effects and slow release in order to provide an effective antibacterial delivery system to progress patient adherence by declining the repetition of prescribed drugs. Sodium alginate and carboxymethyl cellulose were solved in water, and after complete solvation of the polymer, adipic acid dihydrazide as a cross-linker was added to the polymer solution to afford chemically crosslinked hydrogel. The produced hydrogel was purified by the dialysis bag. FT-IR and 1H-NMR spectra identified the presence of an amide group. Surface examination of hydrogel showed a soft texture with a porous structure. Chemical tetracycline drug-loaded hydrogel showed slow-release tetracycline and better antibacterial effects against S. aureus and E. coli strains. Chemical tetracycline drug-loaded hydrogel was slower to release than physical tetracycline drug-loaded hydrogel against bacterial strains. Furthermore, feed-forward input propagation was employed to assess the effect of the time on drug released as response. It confirmed that the prognostic capability of training algorithms is in the order of Levenberg Marquardt (LM) > Bayesian Regularization (BR) > Gradient Descent (GD) for chemically crosslinked hydrogels and GD > BR > LM for physically crosslinked hydrogels. The findings clearly established manufactured hydrogel as an attractive candidate for effective drug delivery while also paving the way for extended delivery systems in other biomedical applications.