Ionic liquids revolutionizing drug delivery: Recent advances and emerging opportunities

Ionic liquids (ILs) have emerged as a transformative platform in drug delivery, overcoming key limitations of conventional systems such as poor drug solubility, low bioavailability, and inadequate targeting. Through rational cation-anion engineering, ILs enable versatile drug loading strategies via ionic/covalent bonding, physical mixing, and nanocarrier encapsulation, while concurrently enhancing biotherapeutic stability, potentiating vaccine immunogenicity, and facilitating transport across critical biological barriers. Recent advances incorporate molecular targeting ligands, pharmacokinetic optimization, and stimuli-responsive mechanisms to achieve spatiotemporally controlled drug release. Growing preclinical and clinical evidence underscores ILs' efficacy in addressing unmet therapeutic needs across diseases such as oncology, neurological disorders, and metabolic diseases. While remarkable progress has been achieved, clinical translation necessitates addressing key challenges in long-term biosafety, scalable manufacturing, and regulatory harmonization. The convergence of ILs technology with artificial intelligence, nanomedicine, and additive manufacturing presents unprecedented opportunities to develop personalized therapeutic platforms. This comprehensive review critically examines the evolution of ILs-based drug delivery systems from fundamental principles to clinical implementation, providing a strategic roadmap for their integration into next-generation precision medicine.