Commentary: Rantosomes and Ravosomes

Abstract

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.—George Santayana

I am fortunate to have entered the liposome research field in its infancy. In that “golden age” of liposome research, scientific advances related to lipid vesicles appeared in the literature on a regular basis and there was little danger of repeating a study because there was so little published. Many of the potential uses of liposomes in drug delivery that have come to be, were discussed in two creative and prescient articles published in 1976 in the New England Journal of Medicine by Gregory Gregoriadis (1). At liposome/ drug carrier meetings, discussions raged over materials, mechanisms, models, methods and structures. My colleagues and I published a few papers dealing with liposome preparation and extrusion through polycarbonate membranes to form defined diameter populations of liposomes (2-4). The extrusion method is widely used and like the original Bangham method (5) for making MLV, it has become so a part of making liposomes that it is no longer cited. For those entering the liposome field the failure to correctly attribute is understandable, given the vast number of liposome publications (Table 1) that have appeared over the ensuing years.