Advances in the use of local anesthetic extended-release systems in pain management

Abstract

Pain management remains among the most common and largely unmet clinical problems today. Local anesthetics play an indispensable role in pain management. The main limitation of traditional local anesthetics is the limited duration of a single injection. To address this problem, catheters are often placed or combined with other drugs in clinical practice to increase the time that local anesthetics act. However, this method does not meet the needs of clinical analgesics. Therefore, many researchers have worked to develop local anesthetic extended-release types that can be administered in a single dose. In recent years, drug extended-release systems have emerged dramatically due to their long duration and efficacy, providing more possibilities for the application of local anesthetics. This paper summarizes the types of local anesthetic drug delivery systems and their clinical applications, discusses them in the context of relevant studies on local anesthetics, and provides a summary and outlook on the development of local anesthetic extended-release agents.

Graphical abstract

Keywords:

• Pain management
• local anesthetics
• extended-release system
• drug delivery system

Authors contributions

Yulu Chen: Writing – Original Draft and drawing the Figures and Tables; Jingmei Xu: Reviewing and Editing; Ping Li, Liyang Shi, Sha Zhang and Qulian Guo: Conceptualization and Editing; Yong Yang: Reviewing and Editing, Supervision. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no new data were created or analyzed in this study.

Additional information

Funding

This study is supported by the Natural Science Funding Project of Hunan Province [grant number 2022JJ30975].