Abstract
Silk is a natural polymer with unique physicochemical and mechanical properties which makes it a desirable biomaterial for biomedical and pharmaceutical applications. Silk fibroin (SF) has been widely used for preparation of drug delivery systems due to its biocompatibility, controllable degradability and tunable drug release properties. SF-based drug delivery systems can encapsulate and stabilize various small molecule drugs as well as large biological drugs such as proteins and DNA to enhance their shelf lives and control the release to enhance their circulation time in the blood and thus the duration of action. Understanding the properties of SF and the potential ways of manipulating its structure to modify its physicochemical and mechanical properties allows for preparation of modulated drug delivery systems with desirable efficacies. This review will discuss the properties of SF material and summarize the recent advances of SF-based drug and gene delivery systems. Furthermore, conjugation of the SF to other biomolecules or polymers for tissue-specific drug delivery will also be discussed.
Highlights
Polymeric drug delivery systems have emerged as a new efficient alternative to the conventional formulations to provide a reservoir to the active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs), improve their physicochemical properties, and overcome some of the major challenges in drug delivery including specific targeting, intracellular transport, and biocompatibility in order to improve the treatment efficiency and life quality of patients [1,2,3,4]
silk fibroin (SF) has been used as a naturally derived biopolymer for development of various types of drug delivery systems including hydrogels, SF films, microparticles and nanoparticles using a variety of fabrication methods
SF micro- and nanoparticles have been used for delivery of different types of drugs such as curcumin, doxorubicin and ibuprofen as well as plasmid DNA (pDNA) to various types of cells in a time-specific or site-specific manner
Summary
Polymeric drug delivery systems have emerged as a new efficient alternative to the conventional formulations to provide a reservoir to the active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs), improve their physicochemical properties, and overcome some of the major challenges in drug delivery including specific targeting, intracellular transport, and biocompatibility in order to improve the treatment efficiency and life quality of patients [1,2,3,4]. The transformation from Silk I to Silk II can be tuned by different methods including organic solvent treatment, physical shear, electromagnetic fields, or chemical processing [13,14] These properties can be utilized in the pharmaceutical industry for producing micro- and nano particles and nano-fibrils or for coating other pharmaceutical preparations such as liposomes [15,16]. Designing delivery systems for biological drugs such as vaccines and antibodies requires maintaining their physical stability as well as their biological activity, which is more crucial for the controlled release systems [19] This is mainly due to the higher sensitivity of the biological compounds, especially the protein-based therapeutics, to many of the processing conditions throughout the delivery system preparation compared to small molecule drugs, which limits the processing strategies [20,21]. The main strategies for obtaining different SF-based drug delivery systems and the recent methods for generating functionalized SF for controlled or targeted drug and gene delivery will be discussed
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