Up-to-date Combinational Polymeric Approaches for the Enhancement of Drug Absorption and Membrane Transductivity

Abstract

Abstract: Many of the challenges concerning pharmaceutical compounds are involved in the tuning of their physical properties and controlled and targeted drug delivery, in order to acquire the optimum therapeutic effect. With these challenges in mind and with the recent emergence of advanced materials, various combinational polymeric approaches have been applied. The use of coordination polymers, which are hybrid inorganic-organic materials, consists of transition metals and multidentate organic ligands and have been proven to prolong the release and increase the drug permeation rate of active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs). Another recent approach is the preparation of deformable polymeric nanoparticles (DPN) that require the physical incorporation of a lipid in a polymeric micelle, offering flexible and deformable phase properties. It has been shown that skin delivery efficiency could be increased due to this deformable phase. Enhanced skin permeation was also observed when TAT peptides were chemically attached to the DPNs. Other recent approaches, such as microarray patches, sustained release microspheres, nanoparticles coated with biological membranes, nanosponges, and lipid-based nanoparticles, modified by polymers, have also been able to improve the pharmacokinetic profiles of APIs and are also discussed in this paper.