Exploring Probiotic Loaded Gastroprotective Microgel Strategy for Gut Health and Ulcer Therapy

Gastric ulcers and inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD) represent a worldwide health issue, which requires treatment options aimed at the underlying pathophysiology, especially gut microbiome dysbiosis. Although probiotics have enormous potential of rebalancing the microbes and mucosal health, their clinical effectiveness is highly undermined by low survival rates in gastrointestinal tract and intermittent colonization. This review examines how probiotic-impregnated gastroprotective microgel is developed as a novel delivery plan to eliminate these obstacles. These microgels offer essential protection against gastric acid and bile salts, permit pH- or enzyme-dependent release to disease-afflicted intestinal locations, and permit mucoadhesions to be maintained at the target site by wrapping live bacteria in engineered polymer systems -alginate, chitosan and gelatin methacryloyl- to afford a prolonged local effect. The design rationale includes the careful selection of strains, material science design, and advanced fabrication methods such as microfluidics to design architectures at the scales of single-cell encapsulation to multi-layer and nano-in-micro system to combine therapy. Upon delivery, the intact probiotics have a multi-modal therapeutic activity, which comprises of improving the epithelial barrier, strong anti-inflammatory and antioxidant activity, inhibition of pathogens, and replacement of an eubiotic flora. Preclinical models are effective in NSAID-induced ulcer, Helicobacter pylori infection, and IBD models, and new platforms are using responsive materials and engineered live biotherapeutics. Nevertheless, there are immense challenges to translation to clinical practice in scalable manufacturing, long-term stability, regulatory routes to live biotherapeutic products (LBPs) and personalization. Finally, probiotic microgels are convergent biotechnological paradigms, which will transform the treatment paradigm toward symptom management to ecological restoration of gut health replacing the current treatment paradigm, unless the important translational challenges can be avoided successfully.