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Review
. 2021 Apr 23:9:580118.
doi: 10.3389/fchem.2021.580118. eCollection 2021.

Lipid Nanoparticles as Carriers for Bioactive Delivery

Neerupma Dhiman  1 , Rajendra Awasthi  1 , Bhupesh Sharma  1 , Harsha Kharkwal  2 , Giriraj T Kulkarni  1
Affiliations
Review

Lipid Nanoparticles as Carriers for Bioactive Delivery

Neerupma Dhiman et al. Front Chem. .

Abstract

Nanotechnology has made a great impact on the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, food, and cosmetics industries. More than 40% of the approved drugs are lipophilic and have poor solubility. This is the major rate-limiting step that influences the release profile and bioavailability of drugs. Several approaches have been reported to administer lipophilic drugs with improved solubility and bioavailability. Nanotechnology plays a crucial role in the targeted delivery of poorly soluble drugs. Nanotechnology-based drug delivery systems can be classified as solid lipid nanoparticulate drug delivery systems, emulsion-based nanodrug delivery systems, vesicular drug delivery systems, etc. Nanotechnology presents a new frontier in research and development to conquer the limitations coupled with the conventional drug delivery systems through the formation of specific functionalized particles. This review presents a bird's eye view on various aspects of lipid nanoparticles as carriers of bioactive molecules that is, synthesis, characterization, advantage, disadvantage, toxicity, and application in the medical field. Update on recent development in terms of patents and clinical trials of solid lipid nanoparticles (SLNs) and nanostructure lipid carriers (NLCs) have also been discussed in this article.

Keywords: nanostructure lipid carriers; recent advances; scale up; solid lipid nanoparticles; stability; toxicity.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Distribution of the reviewed publications between 2013 and 2020 on NLCs and SLNs, by therapeutic field: anticancer therapies (41.8%, light blue); various indications (16.7%, gray); antimicrobials (14.3%, pink); CNS diseases, excluding cancer and infection (12.4%, green); nanovehicles not intended for any specific therapeutic area (7.5%, yellow); and site-specific treatments (7.3%, dark blue). Reproduced with permission from Frontiers in Molecular Biosciences (Montoto et al., 2020).
Figure 2
Figure 2
Schematic representation of sterically stabilized NLCs and SLNs with a neutral surfactant. The oxygen atoms in solid and liquid lipids are shown in orange color. Reproduced with permission from Frontiers in Molecular Biosciences (Montoto et al., 2020).
Figure 3
Figure 3
Structure of drug-loaded SLN particle.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Composition of the SLNs.
Figure 5
Figure 5
Diagrammatic presentation of imperfect, amorphous, and multiple type NLCs.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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