Dendrimers for Therapeutic Delivery: Compositions, Characterizations, and Current Status.

Dendrimers, commonly referred to as arborols, offer tremendous opportunities for drug delivery, diagnostics, and treatment applications. This may be attributed to the characteristic features of their three architectural components: core, branches, and terminal groups. These components provide vast flexibility to designers. They act as highly moldable platforms that can be modified to suit the needs of application designers. Effectively, the type, length, and molecular weight of the core, branches and terminal groups may be customized to achieve desired characteristics and satisfy the demands of numerous applications. These perfectly designed multifunctional structures are reviewed in the current paper, focusing on their complex archetypical design for interphase applications; novel drug delivery applications, especially oral, ocular, pulmonary, transdermal; targeted, and controlled-release; and diagnosis and treatment of diseases like cancer, diabetes, and autoimmune disorders.

Bilayer Tablet Based Chronotherapeutics in the Management of Nocturnal Asthma: An Overview.

BACKGROUND: Asthma is a common ailment with a larger circadian difference. Nocturnal Asthma (NA) is an inconstant exacerbation of asthmatic condition related to the rise in warning sign during the night time and there is a need for its treatment addressing air route alertness and decline in lung functions. These symptoms are linked to sleep or known as circadian events. Chronotherapeutics is a management system based on an in-vivo drug accessibility programmed to check the rhythms of ailment in a direction to improve the therapeutic outcomes by suppressing the side effects. This review aims to provide an overview of NA, chronotherapeutics for the treatment of NA, bilayer tablets, and advanced techniques involved in the fabrication of bilayer tablets. The review also discusses some of the related patents. METHODS: Relevant literature about the latest developments and updated information related to NA, chronotherapeutics and bilayer tablets has been very widely searched on different biomedical literature programs such as Google, Web of Science, PubMed portals, etc. Bilayer tablet mediated chronotherapy has gained significant attention and consideration as it is developed and fabricated based on the body's circadian rhythm. Bilayer tablets can deliver the bioactive compounds at an appropriate time, place as well as amount and site. RESULTS: Available literature advocated that the bilayer matrix tablet containing a single drug in the sustained release film and fast releasing film, may be beneficial for the chronic diseases like asthma, migraine, diabetes, hypertension and inflammation which usually require immediate as well as maintained therapeutic effect. CONCLUSION: The application of nanotechnology in the arena of medicine will transform the diagnosis and treatment strategies of a wide range of diseases in the upcoming years. The findings of this review confirm the importance of bilayer tablet based chronotherapy in nocturnal asthma.

Solid Lipid Nanoparticles: Emerging Colloidal Nano Drug Delivery Systems.

Solid lipid nanoparticles (SLNs) are nanocarriers developed as substitute colloidal drug delivery systems parallel to liposomes, lipid emulsions, polymeric nanoparticles, and so forth. Owing to their unique size dependent properties and ability to incorporate drugs, SLNs present an opportunity to build up new therapeutic prototypes for drug delivery and targeting. SLNs hold great potential for attaining the goal of targeted and controlled drug delivery, which currently draws the interest of researchers worldwide. The present review sheds light on different aspects of SLNs including fabrication and characterization techniques, formulation variables, routes of administration, surface modifications, toxicity, and biomedical applications.

Novel drug delivery systems for NSAIDs in management of rheumatoid arthritis: An overview.

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a systemic autoimmune disease characterized by chronic joint inflammation which ultimately leads to severe disability and premature mortality. It has a global prevalence of around 1% with the incidence among women being 2-3 times more than in men. The pathogenesis of the disease involves preclinical RA, genetic factors, and environmental factors. The RA has no known cure and the primary aim of treatment remains to attain lowest possible disease activity and recovery if possible. The present review highlights the literature on the different treatment options available for the treatment of RA, their mechanisms of action, side effects, and novel drug delivery systems that are in use for drug administration with the main focus on novel drug delivery systems of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs. Different classes of drugs such as corticosteroids, non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) and disease modifying anti-rheumatic drugs (DMARDs), and biologics are discussed with examples of most widely used drugs among each class. Conventional drug therapy has many disadvantages like low solubility and permeability, poor bioavailability, degradation by gastrointestinal enzymes, first pass metabolism, food interactions, and toxicity. Novel drug delivery systems like microspheres, nanoparticles, dendrimers, liposomes, and so on are promising tools as they have been successful in overcoming the disadvantages associated with conventional drug delivery system. The present review squares the various novel drug delivery systems that have been explored for administering anti-rheumatic drugs and the advantages associated with these novel drug delivery systems in comparison to conventional drug delivery systems.

Quality by design (QbD) approaches in current pharmaceutical set-up.

INTRODUCTION: Quality by design (QbD) encourages the pharmaceutical industry to use risk management and science-based manufacturing principles to gain process and product understanding and thus assures quality of the product. With the objective to curb the rising costs for development and regulatory barriers to innovation and creativity, QbD is being widely promoted by Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and International Conference on Harmonization (ICH). AREAS COVERED: This review describes the elements, different design and tools of QbD as well as multidimensional applications of QbD ranging from dosage form and method development to meeting latest regulatory requirements. EXPERT OPINION: The understanding of a process is facilitated by proper identification of sources of variation, management of variability by process design, and prediction of product quality attributes using design space. The pharmaceutical industry is rapidly adopting the QbD principles for fabrication of safe, effective and quality products; however, we are still on a journey and the process of gathering all experience and metrics required for connecting and demonstrating QbD benefits to all stakeholders is still in progress. Understanding the formulation and process parameters with the philosophy of QbD will be useful for the optimization of complex drug delivery systems in the near future.

Dendritic platforms for biomimicry and biotechnological applications.

Dendrimers, commonly referred to as polymeric trees, offer endless opportunities for biotechnological and biomedical applications. By controlling the type, length, and molecular weight of the core, branches and end groups, respectively, the chemical functionality and topology of dendrimeric archetypes can be customized which further can be applied to achieve required solubility, biodegradability, diagnosis and other applications. Given the physicochemical variability of the dendrimers and their hybrids, this review attempts to discuss a full spectrum of recent advances and strides made by these "perfectly designed structures". An extensive biotech/biomimicry application profiling of dendrimers is provided with focus on complex archetypical designs such as protein biomimicry (angiogenic inhibitors, regenerative hydroxyapatite and collagen) and biotechnology applications. In terms of biotechnological advances, dendrimers have provided distinctive advantages in the fields of biocatalysis, microbicides, artificial lights, mitochondrial function modulation, vaccines, tissue regeneration and repair, antigen carriers and even biosensors. In addition, this review provides overview of the extensive chemo-functionalization opportunities available with dendrimers which makes them a perfect candidate for forming drug conjugates, protein hybrids, bio mimics, lipidic derivatives, metal deposits and nanoconjugates thereby making them the most multifunctional platforms for diverse biotechnological applications.

Carbon dots: emerging theranostic nanoarchitectures.

Nanotechnology has gained significant interest from biomedical and analytical researchers in recent years. Carbon dots (C-dots), a new member of the carbon nanomaterial family, are spherical, nontoxic, biocompatible, and discrete particles less than 10nm in diameter. Research interest has focused on C-dots because of their ultra-compact nanosize, favorable biocompatibility, outstanding photoluminescence, superior electron transfer ability, and versatile surface engineering properties. C-dots show significant potential for use in cellular imaging, biosensing, targeted drug delivery, and other biomedical applications. Here we discuss C-dots, in terms of their physicochemical properties, fabrication techniques, toxicity issues, surface engineering and biomedical potential in drug delivery, targeting as well as bioimaging.