Abstract
Advances in materials science and bionanotechnology have allowed the refinements of current drug delivery systems, expected to facilitate the development of personalized medicine. While dermatological topical pharmaceutical formulations such as foams, creams, lotions, gels, etc., have been proposed for decades, these systems target mainly skin-based diseases. To treat systemic medical conditions as well as localized problems such as joint or muscle concerns, transdermal delivery systems (TDDSs), which use the skin as the main route of drug delivery, are very appealing. Over the years, these systems have shown to offer important advantages over oral as well as intravenous drug delivery routes. Besides being non-invasive and painless, TDDSs are able to deliver drugs with a short-half-life time more easily and are well adapted to eliminate frequent administrations to maintain constant drug delivery. The possibility of self-administration of a predetermined drug dose at defined time intervals makes it also the most convenient personalized point-of-care approach. The transdermal market still remains limited to a narrow range of drugs. While small and lipophilic drugs have been successfully delivered using TDDSs, this approach fails to deliver therapeutic macromolecules due to size-limited transport across the stratum corneum, the outermost layer of the epidermis. The low permeability of the stratum corneum to water-soluble drugs as well as macromolecules poses important challenges to transdermal administration. To widen the scope of drugs for transdermal delivery, new procedures to enhance skin permeation to hydrophilic drugs and macromolecules are under development. Next to iontophoresis and microneedle-based concepts, thermal-based approaches have shown great promise to enhance transdermal drug delivery of different therapeutics. In this inaugural article for the section “Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology,” the advances in this field and the handful of examples of thermal technologies for local and systemic transdermal drug delivery will be discussed and put into perspective.
Highlights
Topical remedies, such as creams, gels, ointments, and bandages, rubbed or applied to the skin, have been used over centuries
While reduced graphene oxide (rGO)-based nanocomposites have been mainly proposed for cancer theranostics (Yang et al, 2012; Lim et al, 2013; Shi et al, 2013; Xu et al, 2013), as well as for the ablation of pathogens (Wu et al, 2013; Turcheniuk et al, 2015), we have demonstrated recently their interest for photothermal-based transdermal delivery of small and macromolecular compounds (Figure 5) (Teodorescu et al, 2017; Teodurescu et al, 2017)
Transdermal delivery systems have become a successful alternative for a continuous drug delivery on demand
Summary
Topical remedies, such as creams, gels, ointments, and bandages, rubbed or applied to the skin, have been used over centuries. The well-known Papyrus Ebers (1550 C) is probably one of the oldest records containing the description of many drugs and formulations for the treatment of burns, wounds, blisters, and exudation. The concept that certain drugs can cross the skin might be traced. Heat-Based Transdermal Delivery back to Ibn Sina, a Persian physician, who proposed that dermally applied drugs can have a local effect, but can affect tissue immediately beneath the skin as well as more remote areas, and can be considered as one of the most ancient consideration of transdermal drug delivery. It was observed that next to the primary role of the skin serving as efficient barrier against the invasion of the organism by viruses, bacteria, dust, allergens, toxic chemicals, UV irradiation, and particulate materials (Roberts et al, 2002), some molecules can penetrate more deeply into the skin structure
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