Mammalian erythrocytes as physiological carriers of fluorescent exogenous agents: a comparative study of bovine and camel red blood cells.
Recently attention has been focused on the investigation of new and effective routes for drug administration in order to avoid their side effects in the human body. Red blood cells (RBCs) exhibit many advantages, i.e., they are naturally occurring, biodegradable, and non-immunogenic. Their use as drug carriers has many potential applications, including slow drug delivery to the body tissue and drug targeting to a specific site. In this work, the fluorescent exogenous agent sodium fluorescein (uranin) was used as the probe for the encapsulation of the RBCs. The encapsulation process was applied in two different mammalian RBCs: camel and bovine. The results indicate that the encapsulation efficiency of bovine RBCs was 34.0 +/- 3.0% with an RBC recovery rate of approximately 75% whereas that of camel RBCs was only 8.0 +/- 2.0% with a cell recovery rate of approximately 47%. These differences demonstrate the dependency of the encapsulation process on the type of mammalian source of the RBCs.