Guar gum micro-vehicle mediated delivery strategy and synergistic activity of thymoquinone and piperine: An in vitro study on bacterial and hepatocellular carcinoma cells

This study reports the observed synergy in antimicrobial and anticancer activity of thymoquinone and piperine, encapsulated in porous guar gum micro-vehicle. Natural therapeutics like piperine and thymoquinone showed less effectivity in human medical trials due to their hydrophobicity leading to poor clinical efficacy. To overcome this problem, we have developed a delivery strategy by using guar gum, a natural biodegradable biopolymer. The successful encapsulation of phytochemicals and the microstructures of gum micro-vehicles were confirmed by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), x-ray diffraction (XRD), Field emission scanning electron microscopy (FESEM) and UV–Vis spectra analysis. We also report here a significant decrease in minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) value and synergistic bactericidal activity against four different bacterial strains and observed remarkably low median lethal dose (LD50) value against human hepatocellular carcinoma cell lines along with pH-responsive delivery of therapeutic in the case of combinatorial therapy. In our overall study, we analyze and discuss the structure, efficacy, and delivery of our designed natural therapeutic amalgamation to pave the way for augmenting the use of phytochemicals in medical applications.