Review on Novel Liposomal Methodologies, Commercial Formulations, Clinical Trials and Patents.

What is it about?

Liposomes are well-recognized and essential nano-sized drug delivery systems. Liposomes are phospholipid vesicles comprised of cell membrane components and have been employed as artificial cell models to mimic structure and functions of cells and are of immense use in various biological analyses. Liposomes acquire great advantages and provide wide range of applications as useful drug carriers in pre-clinical and clinical trials. This review summarizes exclusively on scalable techniques for liposome preparation and focuses on the strengths and limitations with respect to industrial applicability. Also, this review discusses the updated recent advancements in biomedical applications with a mention of key highlights of commercially available formulations, clinical trials and patents in recent past. Furthermore, this review also provides brief information of the classification, composition and characterization of liposomes.

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Why is it important?

Liposomes are spherical, closed structures composed of phospholipids in the colloidal size range of 5–200 nm and contains one or more concentric/non-concentric membranes, of around 4 mm thickness [1]. The liposomes consist of amphiphilic phospholipids with hydrophilic head and hydrophobic tail, which aids in unique characteristics such as self-sealing of liposomes in aqueous media. In recent past, much research has been focused on the delivery of antibiotics [2, 3], genes [4, 5], antifungal [6, 7], anti-inflammatory [8, 9] and anti-cancer drugs [10, 11] and also used in many pharmaceutical, biological and medical fields. Reports from various investigations revealed different types of liposomes are classified based on number of bilayers, size and the liposomal composition and are discussed in further sections briefly.