Drug delivery

Drug delivery refers to approaches, formulations, technologies, and systems for transporting a pharmaceutical compound in the body as needed to safely achieve its desired therapeutic effect. It may involve scientific site-targeting within the body, or it might involve facilitating systemic pharmacokinetics; in any case, it is typically concerned with both quantity and duration of drug presence. Drug delivery is often approached via a drug's chemical formulation, but it may also involve medical devices or drug-device combination products. Drug delivery is a concept heavily integrated with dosage form and route of administration, the latter sometimes even being considered part of the definition.

Drug delivery technologies modify drug release profile, absorption, distribution and elimination for the benefit of improving product efficacy and safety, as well as patient convenience and compliance. Drug release is from: diffusion, degradation, swelling, and affinity-based mechanisms. Most common routes of administration include the preferred non-invasive peroral (through the mouth), topical (skin), transmucosal (nasal, buccal/sublingual, vaginal, ocular and rectal) and inhalation routes. Many medications such as peptide and protein, antibody, vaccine and gene based drugs, in general may not be delivered using these routes because they might be susceptible to enzymatic degradation or can not be absorbed into the systemic circulation efficiently due to molecular size and charge issues to be therapeutically effective. For this reason many protein and peptide drugs have to be delivered by injection or a nanoneedle array. For example, many immunizations are based on the delivery of protein drugs and are often done by injection.

Drug Delivery (journal)

Drug Delivery is an academic journal that publishes research on all aspects of drug delivery – a core aspect of drug development. It is owned by Informa plc (LSE: INF) which is a United Kingdom-based publisher and conference company.

Editors

Alfred Stracher and Vladimir Torchilin are co-editors of Drug Delivery.

Alfred Stracher is Distinguished Professor at SUNY Downstate Medical Center, Brooklyn, New York, USA

Vladimir Torchilin was appointed co-editor in 2009 and is currently Distinguished Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences at The Bouvé College of Health Sciences, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA.

Publication Format

Drug Delivery publishes 8 issues per year in simultaneous print and online editions and is available on a subscription basis. Individual articles can be purchased on a pay-per-view basis. The full text of all articles is offered in PDF and PDF Plus formats. All back-issues of the journal are available online and are hosted on the publisher's website.