Various drug delivery approaches to the central nervous system.
BACKGROUND
The presence of the blood-brain barrier (BBB), an insurmountable obstacle, in particular, and other barriers in brain and periphery contribute to hindrance of the successful diagnosis and treatment of a myriad of central nervous system pathologies. This review discusses several strategies adopted to define a rational drug delivery approach to the CNS along with a short description of the strategies implemented by the authors' group to enhance the analgesic activity, a CNS property, of chimeric peptide of Met-enkephalin and FMRFa (YGGFMKKKFMRFa-YFa).


METHODS
Various approaches for drug delivery to the CNS with their beneficial and non-beneficial aspects, supported by an extensive literature survey published recently, up to August 2009.


RESULTS
The reader will have the privilege of gaining an understanding of previous as well as recent approaches to breaching the CNS barriers.


CONCLUSIONS
Among the various strategies discussed, the potential for efficacious CNS drug targeting in future lies either with the non-invasively administered multifunctional nanosystems or these nanosystems without characterstics such as long systemic circulating capability and avoiding reticuloendothelial system scavenging system of the body, endogenous transporters and efflux inhibitors administered by convection-enhanced delivery.
Pasha
Santosh
S
Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology, Peptide Synthesis Laboratory, Mall Road, Delhi-110007, India. spasha@igib.res.in
Gupta
Kshitij
K
D000595:Amino Acid Sequence; D001812:Blood-Brain Barrier; D002490:Central Nervous System / Q000187:drug effects*; D016503:Drug Delivery Systems; D004744:Enkephalin, Methionine / Q000737:chemistry; D019835:FMRFamide / Q000737:chemistry; D006801:Humans; D008969:Molecular Sequence Data; D010446:Peptide Fragments / Q000008:administration & dosage
D010446:Peptide Fragments; D004744:Enkephalin, Methionine; D019835:FMRFamide