Muscle strain is one of the most common
injuries with high intermittence rate. Due to diverseness of strain
injuries, different experimental animal models are employed to investigate such
injuries with reproducible results. Cubosomes, an emerging nano
drug delivery tool, are considered ideal carriers for the topical delivery of lipophilic drugs to treat local
inflammations with reduced frequency of application for prolonged periods. This work describes the development of
Felbinac-loaded cubosomal gel and investigated the treatment of
inflammation and tissue injury in vivo. Sciatic Function Index (SFI) is a simple clinical method to observe hind limb recovery in rats after induced
injuries. First, cubosomes were fabricated by high-pressure homogenization process and evaluated for in vitro parameters. The optimized cubosome formulation was chosen to develop cubosomal gel and evaluated for in vitro parameters and also investigated time to recovery of SFI after strain induction in tibialis anterior muscles in rats. The cubosome formulation (F4) exhibited low droplet size (51.04 ± 1.37 nm)and polydispersity index (0.085 ± 1.13), and negative zeta potential (-32.8 ± 0.67 mV). In rats, topical application of cubosomal gel formulation (CGF) exhibited significant improvement in skin permeation (402 ± 6.08 μg) and
drug flux (15.71 ± 0.82 μg/cm2 h) compared to plain gel. Also, CGF demonstrated significant difference in SFI from first to seventh day. The histology of rat skin showed significant effect for groups treated with
Felbinac-loaded CGF compared to a negative control group.