Progesterone diffusion through snake skin as ahuman model membrane

Thanks to its physical and chemical structure, shed snake skin can be used as a model membrane for human skin in in vitro drug delivery experiments. The progesterone mass transfer through Bitis gabonica skin has been studied using a suitable diffusion glass cell. A lag time of 5.7 hours, representative the unsteady diffusion regime, has been observed. After this lag time, the system reaches the steady-state condition during which the diffusion coefficient and the partition coefficient of progesterone in the system have been calculated by the integration of Fick’s laws