Liposomal Hybrid Silicon - Organic Means of Delivery of Medicinal Preparations

Abstract

Nowadays, chemotherapy is an important mean for cancer treatment. Despite many benefits, patients receiving anticancer drugs often suffer unfavorable side effects due to the non-specific toxicity of anticancer drugs. Most anticancer drugs can kill cancer cells with non-selective killing of the normal human cells, which brings great pains to patients. One of the most important tasks facing pharmacology is the creation of such systems that would minimize the harm caused by therapeutic drugs. One way to overcome these problems is to create drug delivery systems. Much attention is attracted the liposomes as delivery systems. They consist of natural components that can minimize toxicity in relation to the human body, so liposomes are interest to study. However, one of the limitations preventing the wide use of liposomes is their insufficient stability under physiological conditions. This property can lead to the fact that the drug will be released from the delivery system until the desired cells or tissues are reached, which means that it damages healthy cells. The problem of stability can be solved by systems called cerasomes. These are nanosized spherical particles consisting of the lipid bilayer as well as liposomes, but their surface is modified by a silicon polymer network. Liposomal nanohybrid cerasomes have been developed based on organoalkoxysilane through a sol-gel reaction in combination with self-assembly process. Among inorganic materials, silicon is an excellent choice to form hydrophilic surface shell due to its high chemical resistance, optical transparency and low physiological toxicity. In addition, cerasomes have better biocompatibility than silicon nanoparticles that have a similar size. They are inert and exhibit less cytotoxicity. Cerasomes are very convenient to store for a certain time due to their physical and chemical properties. Equally important is the fact that cerasomes are capable of encapsulate a wide range of drug molecules. Water-soluble drugs are built into the internal field of the vesicles, and hydrophobic drugs are built into the bilayer lipid membrane. So cerasomes can solve many problems associated with drug molecules like low drug solubility, fast clearance rates, non-specific toxicity, thereby enhancing therapeutic efficiency and reducing side effects. Also, various functional molecules can be included to cerasomes that show thermo-, light-, pH- or multi sensitive properties by chemical conjugation with different molecules in order to modulate the release behavior of the drug. Therefore, cerasomes, serving as delivery carriers, possess great potential for clinical applications due to their unique advantages. This review will summarize the progress of liposomal nanohybrid cerasomes and their applications as drug nanocarriers, transfection of gene materials, systems for visualization and diagnosis of diseases using MRI and PDT. It presents some methods of the synthesis of cerasome-forming lipids to create stable systems of cerasomes. Various approaches of the formation of a siloxane network on their surface are considered. Various variants of modifications of cerasome-forming lipids are presented.