Curcumin (Curcuma longa) is a naturally occurring drug, found in particular in saffron, which improves wound healing, has anti-inflammatory, antimicrobial, antioxidant, and especially anticancer properties. Thus, in this study, curcumin has been studied in association with chitosan which is a natural polymer with attractive features such as: high hydrophilicity, biocompatibility and non-toxicity, besides function effectively as a carrier for the preparation of formulations in drug release. Therefore the objective of this study was to develop scaffolds of chitosan and chitosan/curcumin by the particle aggregation method, using sodium sulfate as a bath solution. The structures were characterized by Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR), Optical Microscopy (OM), Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM), Energy Dispersive X-Ray Spectroscopy (EDS) and Cytotoxicity. From the FTIR results, it was observed the presence of bands corresponding to sulfate, due to the sodium sulfate used as a coagulant for the production of the spheres. Its presence was also observed in EDS. According to the OM and SEM it was found that the addition of the drug resulted in an external structure with the regular particles. The biological tests showed satisfactory results showing no cytotoxicity of the scaffolds.

The present study investigates the production of ten different molecular weights of chitosan products from shrimp shells collected from Alexandria (the second largest city in Egypt after Greater Cairo) and their properties were investigated and compared with standard chitosan sample. Extraction of chitin from shrimp shells at laboratory scale was done and it has depended on three steps: deproteinization (DP), demineralization (DM), and decolourization (DC). The optimum conditions for the best yield and color of the chitin products included 5% sodium hydroxide solution in DP step, an acid concentration of 3% HCl in DM step at room temperature, and keeping the product in potassium permanganate solution (1%, w/v) for 1 h, followed by keeping it in oxalic acid (1%, w/v) for the process of DC. Chitin yield ranged from 25.6 to 51.60% depends on shells dry weight and age of the shrimp samples. Chitosan was then obtained by deacetylation (DA) of chitin with sodium hydroxide pellets at weight ratio of 1:5, respectively. The yield of chitosan products was ranged from 16.20 to 33.40% based on dry weight. Different intrinsic properties included ash content, degree of deacetylation (DDA), solubility, viscosity, and average molecular weight of extracted chitosan products were determined through standard methods. The FT-IR and 1H-NMR spectra of the extracted products were studied with satisfactory results.

Chitin and its deacetylated derivative chitosan are biopolymers with many applications in the food and pharmaceutical industries mainly. There are many papers where the extraction of chitin is described and in most of them HCl is used in the step of demineralization of shrimp shells, in this paper we introduce the use of three organic acids and two mineral acids in the step demineralization in the process of extraction of chitin from shells of shrimp (Parapenaeus longirostis, Lucas 1846) order to determine its effectiveness in the process, for this purpose the chitin obtained was deacetylated and intrinsic viscosity and molecular weight of resulting chitosan was measured. We have also studied the antioxidant activity having the resulting chitosan using the β-carotene bleaching method and DPPH radical scavenging activity, resulting that chitosan obtained from chitin in which demineralization process we used citric acid presents the highest antioxidant activity in both cases.