Topical Drug Delivery: Challenges, Opportunities, Novel Approaches and Recent Advances

Dear Colleagues,

Topical drug delivery refers to the delivery of drugs via skin and is considered an attractive alternative to oral and parenteral routes. Topical drug delivery has advantages, such as non-invasive delivery, bypass of first pass metabolism, prolonged duration of action, reduced dosing frequency, constant levels of drug in the plasma, reduced drug toxicity/adverse events, and improved patient compliance. However, development of a new topical product is very challenging as skin acts as a major barrier for entry of drugs and foreign materials into the body. In addition to skin, other factors, such as physicochemical parameters of the drug (solubility, molecular weight or size, and hydrogen bonding) and formulation characteristics influence the performance of a topical drug product. Several approaches have been investigated in the literature to address these challenges, which include physical methods (iontophoresis, thermal ablation, radiofrequency, etc.) chemical methods (use of permeation enhancers) and novel formulation approaches (microneedles, nano-formulations, lipid-based drug delivery systems). In addition to these there have been advances in the techniques used to evaluate the performance/characteristics of a topical formulation. Some of them include advances in in vitro permeation testing (IVPT), in vitro release testing (IVRT), microscopy, in vitro in vivo correlations (IVIVC), use of alternatives to human skin, such as polymeric membranes, cultured human skin model and others.

In this Special Issue, we solicit the submission of research articles, reviews related to the advances in the topical formulation development. This could also include topical delivery via skin and eye.

Dr. Santosh Aryal
Dr. Pradeep Kumar Bolla
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Biomedicines is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• topical formulation
• skin delivery
• in-vitro permeation test (IVPT)
• in-vitro release test (IVRT)
• franz cells
• ocular drug delivery
• creams
• gels
• emulsions
• emulgels
• lipid nanoparticles
• nanoformulation for topical delivery