Isolation of mucilage from herbal plants and its evaluation as a pharmaceutical excipients

In current scenario pharmaceutical dosage forms contain many additives besides the active ingredients to assist manufacturing and to obtain the desired effect to the pharmaceutical active ingredients Plant Mucilages are pharmaceutically important polysaccharide with wide range of applications such as thickening, binding, disintegrating, suspending, emulsifying, stabilizing and gelling agents. Naturally availablemucilages are preferred to synthetic materials due to their non toxicity, low cost, emollient and non-irritating nature. The synthetic polymers have certain disadvantages such as high cost, toxicity, environmental pollution during synthesis, non-renewable sources, side effects, less patient compliance, etc. mucilages are potent candidate to be used in various pharmaceutical formulations as a potential candidate for novel drug delivery system (NDDS). In this review, we describe the developments in natural gums, mucilages and Pectins for use in the pharmaceutical sciences.