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Review
. 2023 Jul 31;13(33):23087-23121.
doi: 10.1039/d3ra03369d. eCollection 2023 Jul 26.

Recent developments in natural biopolymer based drug delivery systems

Tanzeela Fazal  1 , Bibi Nazia Murtaza  2 , Mazloom Shah  3 , Shahid Iqbal  4 , Mujaddad-Ur Rehman  5 , Fadi Jaber  6   7 , Ayed A Dera  8 , Nasser S Awwad  9 , Hala A Ibrahium  10
Affiliations
Review

Recent developments in natural biopolymer based drug delivery systems

Tanzeela Fazal et al. RSC Adv. .

Abstract

Targeted delivery of drug molecules to diseased sites is a great challenge in pharmaceutical and biomedical sciences. Fabrication of drug delivery systems (DDS) to target and/or diagnose sick cells is an effective means to achieve good therapeutic results along with a minimal toxicological impact on healthy cells. Biopolymers are becoming an important class of materials owing to their biodegradability, good compatibility, non-toxicity, non-immunogenicity, and long blood circulation time and high drug loading ratio for both macros as well as micro-sized drug molecules. This review summarizes the recent trends in biopolymer-based DDS, forecasting their broad future clinical applications. Cellulose chitosan, starch, silk fibroins, collagen, albumin, gelatin, alginate, agar, proteins and peptides have shown potential applications in DDS. A range of synthetic techniques have been reported to design the DDS and are discussed in the current study which is being successfully employed in ocular, dental, transdermal and intranasal delivery systems. Different formulations of DDS are also overviewed in this review article along with synthesis techniques employed for designing the DDS. The possibility of these biopolymer applications points to a new route for creating unique DDS with enhanced therapeutic qualities for scaling up creative formulations up to the clinical level.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1. Classification of different polysaccharide, protein and nucleotide-based biopolymers.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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