Pharmaceutical nanocarriers for the formulation of poorly soluble drug
Poor solubility of drugs has always been an issue for formulation scientists thus the search for novel excipients or techniques is an ever-important field in the pharmaceutical developments. Besides the conventional solubilizers or pH adjusters and methods in the past decades particle size reduction is one of the new techniques to enhance the solubility of poorly water soluble drugs.
Until now several colloidal carrier systems have been evaluated. One of the colloidal carrier systems is the human serum albumin based nanoparticles. Human serum albumin (HSA) has acclaimed a wide acceptance in drug formulation as a nanocarrier system of active pharmaceuticals ingredient (API). Contrarily to some conventional excipients it is biocompatible and well tolerated by the human organism without serious side-effects, such as toxicity. The binding of drugs to serum proteins is particularly important because it affects both the activity of drugs and their disposition. It has been shown that the in vitro binding of poorly soluble drugs to HSA during the formulation can significantly increase the solubility of the drug allowing the API to be dissolved in therapeutically effective doses in an adequate aqueous dosage form to be used for parenteral administration. Further research in the field proved that the use of preparations containing albumin nanoparticles does not only improve the solubility of the drug, but can also exhibit other beneficial effects, such as targeted
therapy.
