Vesicles: a recently developed novel carrier for enhanced topical drug delivery

As skin is one of the crucial and important organs of the human body, delivering the drug across it requires an effective development in the field of research. Topical drug delivery system is specifically designed with the objective to accomplish the delivery of therapeutically active drugs across the skin. Though skin is considered to be a multifunctional organ of a human body, it has the limitation of lesser permeability across the stratum corneum. As this layer constitutes an effective barrier for the drugs, various carrier systems have been developed to overcome this barrier. Vesicular carriers are one of the recently invented carriers. Liposomes, niosomes, transferosomes and ethosomes constitute the major part of these vesicles that have been sufficiently employed for the treatment of variety of topical skin diseases. In the past few years various research reports on the development of topical carrier systems showed that these carriers have emerged as a novel vesicular carrier. These are considered to be effective enough for the enhanced and safe delivery of both hydrophilic and lipophilic drugs. The present review focuses on the topical delivery via these vesicles, emphasizing on various aspects of all these carriers.