Sayantan Sadukhan, Paromita Bakshi, Sabyasachi Maiti

Abstract

About 40% of the drugs currently being discovered suffered from their poor water solubility and thus exhibited dissolution rate limited absorption following oral administration. Because of this, their formulation development has been halted for several years and presents a challenge to the formulation scientists. Various strategies have been adopted in order to improve their solubility and bioavailability. However, each of them has its own drawbacks and none was found appropriate for all the drug candidates in surmounting the oral bioavailability problems. In continuation with the search for an effective solubilization technique, surfactant micellar system was found useful. However, the surfactants have high critical association concentration and thus can cause premature release of drugs. On contrary, copolymer micellar systems are found stable and useful for solubilization and delivery of poorly water soluble drugs. Although, synthetic copolymers are investigated to a greater extent, the investigation on biopolymer-based micellar systems are limited. The purpose of this review is to highlight the basic understanding of the copolymer micellar systems, biopolymer studied so far in the design of micelles, drug loading strategies, recent developments and their future prospects in drug delivery.