Transethosomes and Nanoethosomes: Recent Approach on Transdermal Drug Delivery System

Abstract

In the past few decades, an emerging drug delivery system that came into light is transder- mal drug delivery system. It has become the talk of the town in the field of drug delivery because of its better and easy accessibility. Though it is one of the attractive routes, trans- port of drug through the skin has remained a challenge. To overcome the challenge, vesicular system has been adopted so as to have better skin permeation of bioactive agents. Vesicular system like liposome has shown inefficiency to cross the layers of skin. Then transethosomes and nanoethosomes are employed for delivering drug into the deeper layer of skin. Nanoethosomes and transethosomes have same composition that is water, ethanol and phospholipid. Transethosome contains edge activator additionally. Due to the presence of ethanol and edge activator, it displayed enhanced skin permeation. Vesicular system gives a better patient compliance, being a non-invasive method of drug administra- tion. In this chapter, we attempted to provide brief information about methods of preparation, characterization and pharmaceutical uses of nanoethosomes and transethosomes.