Transdermal patches fabricated from hyaluronic acid for the enhanced skin penetration of therapeutic entities

Abstract

Skin is an attractive route for drug delivery. However poor permeation of drugs across the skin due to the presence of extremely ordered architecture of outermost layer of skin, led to several investigation to improve the permeability of drugs. Polysaccharides remain widely studied biomaterial for the sustained delivery of drug molecules across the skin. The advance of hyaluronic acid (HA) chemistry with multiple benefits has improved the attention of research groups for its application in the skin transportation of drug molecules. Beginning from the advantages of transdermal route, the present review details the application of HA in transdermal drug delivery. In the last few decades, substantial investigation in the domain has improved the requirement for an outline of all the developments, which is depicted in the review. The review also presented different types of HA based transdermal devices such as transferosomes, nanoemulsions, microneedle etc and their potential to improve the transdermal drug delivery. Furthermore the application of HA through chemical modification as a potential transdermal device is also presented. Keywords: Hyaluronic acid, transdermal drug delivery, microneedles, nanoemulsion, hydrogel