Natural & synthetically-modified cyclodextrins and polymers in drug delivery systems

Abstract

Cyclodextrins are natural cyclic oligosaccharides that play a relevant role in different fields as pharmacy, medicine, chemistry, material, food or agricultural science. From the point of view of pharmaceutical and medical applications cyclodextrins have interest for their ability to form inclusion complexes with different host molecules as drugs. In the pharmaceutical industry, cyclodextrins has been used classically as solubilizes of hydrophobic drugs or as stabilizers of some labile molecules but can also offer interesting possibilities for drug control release of both hydrophobic and hydrophilic drugs. New and interesting perspectives for their use is being developed in recent years by the development of novel cyclodextrin derivatives including the polymeric one. The proposed topic for this special number of CTMC aims to provide new successes, challenges and recent advances on the design and applications of new CDs derivatives into the biomedical and pharmaceutical field .