Implantable Drug Delivery System: An Innovative Approach

Abstract

The conventional routes of drug administration has limited control over drug release and maintaining constant plasma therapeutic drug concentrations for longer periods of time. To avoid these problems associated with utilization of traditional dosage forms, there was essential need for development of new dosage forms which would discharge drugs at controlled rate for local activity. This led to improvement of Novel Drug Delivery Systems (NDDS) that offers optimisation of therapeutic properties of drugs and makes them safer, productive and dependable over traditional ways of administration. Implantable drug delivery system (IDDS) forms a part of novel drug delivery system. This route of administering medications allows targeted distribution, location specificity, constant release rate, low amount of drug requirements, and minimisation of adverse effects with improved efficacy. It provides possibility of administering drugs once weekly to yearly which otherwise previously require frequent daily dosing. Different implantable technologies are currently in use for many therapeutic applications such as in dentistry, ophthalmology, contraception and oncology. However, the expensiveness of this newly improved drug delivery system is quite high which hinders its large scale use. Moreover, the recently developed devices require further enhancement and hence thorough scientific trials are needed before wide implementation in populations.
 Keywords: Implantable drug delivery, implants, drug delivery system, implantable pump, modulated drug delivery, novel drug delivery system