Abstract

Kerryn Joseph A. D. Silva, Suresh N.*, Preethi Fernandiz and S. Srinivasan

ABSTRACT

Oral drug delivery is the most preferred administration route due to noninvasive, high patient compliance, convenient to handle, and does not require any specific sterile conditions. However, some of the drugs administered orally face several physical, biological, and biochemical barriers which lower the therapeutic efficacy of the drugs before getting absorbed into the systemic circulation. Oral medication is the most common form of drug administration because of advantages such as convenience of drug administration via the oral route, patient preference, cost-effectiveness, and ease of large-scale manufacturing of oral dosage forms. Around 60% of established small-molecule drug products available commercially are administered via the oral route. Current estimates indicate that oral formulations represent about 90% of the global market share of all pharmaceutical formulations intended for human use. The delivery systems are mainly based on natural or synthetic materials containing properties relating to absorption enhancer, pH-responsive, stimulation of the living cells. Bioinspired and biomimetic systems are biocompatible, biodegradable, nontoxic, selective, and specific, thus considered as excellent oral drug delivery tools. These systems are copied or modified from natural sources and utilized for oral drug delivery applications. They are very much capable of protecting the drug or therapeutics from GI acidic and enzymatic degradation and release adequately in the targeted site, enhance the drug delivery and ultimately produces the desired pharmacological action.