Future Outlook of Nanopharmacy: Challenges and Opportunities

Dan Peer, Marcel Van de Voorde

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingChapterpeer-review

Abstract

The use of nanocarriers (NCs) for the delivery of drugs, termed as Nanopharmacy, has emerged as a novel field in medicine integrating nanoscale technologies with materials sciences, chemistry, pharmacy, and biology. This chapter discusses several explanations for why NCs as anticancer drugs do not fulfill their full potential. Animal studies are essential preclinical models in the field of anticancer drugs development in order to measure the performance of the NCs and the encapsulated drug under whole animal conditions. It is more than necessary to develop reliable techniques that allow an accurate determination of NC stability in biological fluids along with an in vivo like blood medium. Among the important parameters are size distribution, surface charge, quantitative analysis of lipids composition, drug loading rate, and formulation stability. Moving from drug entrapped in NCs at a lab scale to scale up production for clinical testing is a multilevel complex problem, which requires optimization steps or various parameters.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationPharmaceutical Nanotechnology
Subtitle of host publicationInnovation and Production
Pages735-742
Number of pages8
ISBN (Electronic)9783527800681
DOIs
StatePublished - 1 Jan 2016

Keywords

  • anticancer drugs development
  • biological fluids
  • clinical testing
  • lipid-based nanoparticles
  • medicine integrating nanoscale technologies
  • nanocarriers
  • nanopharmacy

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • General Engineering
  • General Materials Science
  • General Medicine

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