Drug delivery for fighting infectious diseases: a global perspective

Emerging concerns of infectious diseases and drug delivery challenges

“…Additionally, shorter duration of treatment also improves the patient compliance. Development of new drug delivery systems along with development of the new antiinfective molecules are the top strategies in potentially preventing infectious diseases [5] , [47] , [48] , [49] , [50] .…”

“…Commonly seen side effects of conventional therapy include long-term treatment, poor patient compliance, and various antibiotic-dependent adverse effects. New strategies for the development of antiinfective medicine contain synergistic combination of antibiotics, which can improve drug efficacy, reduced side effects and can decrease time of treatment compared to the conventional antibiotics [25] , [49] , [53] .…”

“…Along with this, insufficient knowledge regarding microorganisms’ biology and little or no practice of developing small molecules are the main reasons which affect the development of new antiinfective agents. However, latest knowledge regarding the microorganism's characteristics, which are responsible for the resistance development such as biofilm production, molecular interfering with host immune response, efflux pump, etc., have helped in decreasing the resistance development toward the antibiotics [25] , [49] .…”

“…The newer quorum sensing antibiotics are found to be better pathogen blockers compared to the traditional antibiotic because they are not targeted to kill the pathogens. Even if these antibiotics entered the intracellular space, their availability is limited due to the lack of the sufficient permeability toward the cell envelop and this condition further worsens in case of gram-negative bacteria [49] , [56] . Ligand decorated nanoformulations [17] , [40] of various antibiotics could be explored to reduce toxicity, increase drug localization index with better macrophage uptake, potential immunomodulatory effect, and antimicrobial activity as alternative to available formulations of antibiotics.…”

“…Targeting and releasing antimicrobial drugs into infected reservoirs could be achieved by development of multifunctional nanocargoes encapsulated with drug. It seems to be promising strategy to circumvent the challenge of multidrug resistance [25] , [49] , [70] .…”