Vesicular Carriers: A novel Approach for a successful Transdermal Drug Delivery System

Document Type : Review Articles

Authors

1 Department of Pharmaceutics and Pharmaceutical Technology, Faculty of Pharmacy (Girls), Al-Azhar University, Cairo, Egypt.

2 Department of Pharmaceutical Technology, National Research Center, Giza, Egypt

Abstract

Skin acts as a major target as well as a principal barrier for topical/transdermal drug delivery. Many attempts have been exploited by scientists over a long time to overcome the strong barrier property of the stratum corneum, the top most layer of human skin. These attempts include physically-aided methods, chemical penetration enhancers and vesicular carrier technology such as liposomes, niosomes, transferosomes, ethosomes and so forth. Vesicular drug delivery systems are highly organised assemblies made up of one or more concentric bilayers that arise when amphiphilic building blocks self-assemble in the presence of water. The goal of this article is to give a brief overview of the different types of transdermal vesicular drug delivery systems in particular ethosomes. Liposomes and niosomes were successful drug reservoirs for topical/local drug route, Further carriers were designed to tackle the drawbacks of conventional liposomes and niosomes aiming at delivering high molecular weight and hydrophilic /lipophilic drug moieties across deeper skin layers such as ufosomes or further in systemic blood circulation, including ethosomes, transferosomes, invasomes and so forth.

Keywords

Main Subjects

Files

Share

How to cite

Statistics