Ceramics-based Drug Delivery System: A Review and Outlook

Abstract

The drug delivery system (DDS) is a hot spot in the field of medicine due to their favorable characteristics, such as the realizability of targeted therapy, sustained and controlled release of drug. Ceramic materials have abundant desirable properties, such as simple preparation, adjustable size and structure, surface area to volume ratio, desirable stability under physiological conditions and excellent biocompatibility, etc. Hence they have been successfully applied in the field of DDS considerably in decades, acting as drug carriers. Traditional ceramic materials refer to inorganic solid compound. They are mainly composed of carbides, oxides such as hydroxyapatite, tricalcium phosphate, silica, zeolite, and zirconia, etc. This review summarized the applications of the ceramic materials in the field of DDS in recent years, meanwhile the outlooks of future development were also proposed.