Abstract

A REVIEW ON NOVEL APPROACH OF DRUG DELIVERYETHOSOMES

Ayesha Siddiqua* and Syed Abdul Mohi Taha

Abstract

Skin is the largest and most easily accessible organ of the body, it serves as a potential route of drug administration for systemic effects, but the outer layer of the skin i.e the stratum corneum, represents the most resistible barrier to drug penetration across the skin, which limits the transdermal bioavailability of drugs. Therefore, special carriers are required to combat the natural skin barrier to deliver drug molecules with different physicochemical properties to the systemic circulation. Transdermal drug-delivery systems offer many advantages, such as avoidance of first-pass metabolism by the liver, controlled delivery of drugs, reduced dosing frequency, and improved patient compliance, as they are noninvasive and can be self-administered. A classical approach is ethosomal drug delivery. Ethosomes are noninvasive delivery carriers that enable drugs to reach the deep skin layers and/or the systemic circulation. These are soft, malleable vesicles tailored for enhanced delivery of active agents. They are composed mainly of phospholipids, high concentration of ethanol and water. The methods that are used extensively to prepare ethosomes are hot method, cold method and classic mechanical dispersion method. The characterization techniques used to determine ethosomes are Scanning electron microscopy, zeta potential, Entrapment efficiency, Transmission electron microscopy, etc. The marketed products of ethosomes are Nanominox, Noicellex, Supavir cream, Cellutight EF etc. The advantage of applying ethosomes in cosmeceuticals is not only to increase the stability of the cosmetic chemicals and decrease skin irritation from the irritating cosmetic chemicals, but also for transdermal permeation enhancement, especially in the elastic forms. The scope of this review is to introduce the novel concept of ethosomes and to describe some approaches and mechanisms of stimulating topical and transdermal products with ethosomes.

Keywords: Ethosomes, Novel drug delivery, penetration enhancer, Percutaneous absorption.