Allergic contact dermatitis (ACD) is an inflammatory dermatitis with a high morbidity and recurrence rate. Scientific attention is focused on the development of safe and comfortable therapeutics of ACD. Herein, we propose a natural matrine-integrated pollen delivery system for the ACD treatment. Sunflower pollens were collected and defatted to serve as adhesive drug carriers for matrine. Specifically, the exquisite porous and hollow structures of the pollen shells can absorb matrine and realize the sustained drug release. Besides, the prickly surface morphology can strongly adhere to the inflamed skin sites, which can prolong the duration of the drug. By utilizing them in an ACD model and an acute pruritus model of mice, we have demonstrated that these matrine-integrated pollen shells can decrease the swelling degree of mice ears and weight loss, down-regulate inflammatory response, and improve the scratching times. These results indicate that our matrine-integrated pollen delivery systems have great potential to serve as natural topical preparations for skin disease therapy.
The skin is an important site for local or systemic application of drugs. However, most of the drugs have poor permeability through the skin’s outermost layer, stratum corneum. The aim of this study was to develop a method to enable transdermal delivery of morin (3, 5, 7, 2, 4-pentahydroxyflavone), which is a poorly water-soluble drug with anti-inflammatory properties obtained from natural products. Morin phospholipid complex (MPC) was prepared and then loaded in Carbopol 940 hydrogel (MPC-gel), which can significantly increase the transdermal flux of morin based on the in vitro skin penetration data presented in this paper. To further enhance permeation, different compositions of penetration enhancers were dispersed in the gel and screened. After applied onto the mouse skin, MPC-gel showed apparent reduction of ear swelling in 2, 4-dinitrofluorobenzene (DNFB)-induced allergic contact dermatitis (ACD). Further determination of cytokines levels, histopathological analysis and T lymphocytes proliferation indicates that the MPC-gel is potent enough to reduce the inflammatory response mediated by the DNFB in ACD mice model. Collectively, we anticipate that such an approach may provide a new treatment for topical ACD.