Abstract
Albumin, the most abundant protein in plasma, possesses some inherent beneficial structural and physiological characteristics that make it suitable for use as a drug delivery agent, such as an extraordinary drug-binding capacity and long blood retention, with a high biocompatibility. The use of these characteristics as a nanoparticle drug delivery system (DDS) offers several advantages, including a longer circulation time, lower toxicity, and more significant drug loading. To date, many innovative liposome preparations have been developed in which albumin is involved as a DDS. These novel albumin-containing liposome preparations show superior deliverability for genes, hydrophilic/hydrophobic substances and proteins/peptides to the targeting area compared to original liposomes by virtue of their high biocompatibility, stability, effective loading content, and the capacity for targeting. This review summarizes the current status of albumin applications in liposome-based DDS, focusing on albumin-coated liposomes and albumin-encapsulated liposomes as a DDS carrier for potential medical applications.
Highlights
The uptake of naringenin-loaded albumin-coated liposomes by activated hepatic stellate cells (HSCs) was 1.5 times higher than that of naringenin-loaded liposomes with no albumin coating, suggesting that naringenin-loaded albumin-coated liposomes increased the targeting of activated HSCs via albumin and SPARC-dependent pathways in treating liver fibrosis. These results indicate that albumin-coated liposomes would be a feasible drug delivery system (DDS) carrier to SPARC-expressing cells such as HSCs and pancreatic cancer [41]
Such research shows the practical advantages of albumin-associated liposomes over general PEGylated liposomes and albuminbased DDS preparations for the delivery of hydrophobic and hydrophilic substances, the removal of immunogenetics of polyethylene glycol (PEG), improved biocompatibility, and prolonged blood retention
Albumin can compensate for some of the drawbacks associated with the use of liposomes and vice versa
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. These preparations take advantage of the following inherent structural and physiological characteristics of albumin—Albumin has a good biocompatibility with a long plasma half-life, the aqueous solubility of endogenous and exogenous hydrophobic substances can be improved by their binding to albumin, and the cysteine residue at position 34 of albumin readily reacts with oxidative products and other thiol groups (Figure 1) Both academia and industry have used various approaches to develop novel albuminassociated pharmaceutical preparations: (i) albumin-drug conjugation to prolong blood retention [11,12,13,14,15], (ii) nanoparticulation by albumin aggregates to improve stability and the loading efficiency of hydrophobic substances [16,17,18], (iii) liposome, micelles, niosomes, and emulsions fused with albumin to compensate for their drawbacks [19,20,21,22,23]. This review summarizes the current status of using albumin in liposome-based DDS
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