Lipid-Based Vesicles (Liposomes) and Their Combination with Physical Methods for Dermal and Transdermal Drug Delivery

Liposomes have been successfully applied for dermal and transdermal drug delivery, depending on their composition. Conventional phospholipid-based liposomes are only used for dermal drug delivery, i.e. in dermatology to treat cutaneous disorders or the cutaneous manifestations of general diseases. In contrast, deformable phospholipid-based vesicles can be used for both dermal and transdermal drug delivery. However, when applied alone, even deformable vesicles are mostly used to provide drugs in the deeper skin layers. If the goal is to achieve systemic absorption of drugs i.e. transdermal drug delivery, the most promising results are obtained when vesicles are applied together with physical penetration-enhancing methods (microneedles, iontophoresis, ultrasound, and electroporation). This combination of enhancement methods has been shown to offer superiority to their single use. Thus, deformable vesicles combined with physical enhancement methods indeed enable transdermal drug delivery, i.e. obtaining systemic drug effects by noninvasive drug administration, thus exhibiting numerous advantages compared to conventional drug administration, such as the avoidance of the first-pass metabolism, controlling the rate of drug input over a prolonged time, and hence ensuring constant plasma levels even for drugs with short half-times, better patient compliance, etc. This chapter reviews promising results obtained by the combination of different lipid-based vesicles (conventional liposomes, Transfersomes, ethosomes, invasomes) with different physical enhancement methods.