Nasal Drug Delivery:An Overview

Nasal drug delivery is the one of the route administration to achieve faster and higher level of drug absorption. In order to design an efficient formulation, there is need of study physiochemical properties of drug and the factor affecting nasal absorption of drug. The nasal absorption of peptide and protein drug is restricted due to their large molecular size and enzymatic degradation. Nasal drug delivery has a great potential to treat both acute and chronic diseases. Last 28 years of nasal drug delivery research has provided only a handful of products in market. Most of these products are of conventional molecules rather than protein molecules. The suggested reason for drug products of protein and peptide molecule do not meet the regulatory requirements is due to low bioavailability and high toxicity of drug products incorporated with bioavailability enhancers. One of the most important factors hindering the quality of nasal drug product is inter and intra subject variability in pharmacokinetics of dosage forms. Bioavailability of nasal drug products is one of the major challenges for pharmaceutical companies to bring their product in market. The circumstances, which do not favor clinical applicability of nasal drug product is the lack of enough basic research in the area of nasal drug delivery.