The battle of lipid-based nanocarriers against blood-brain barrier: a critical review

Abstract

Central nervous system integrity is the state of brain functioning across sensory, cognitive, emotional-social behaviors, and motor domains, allowing a person to realise his full potential. Thus, brain disorders seriously affect patients’ quality of life. Efficient drug delivery to treat brain disorders remains a crucial challenge due to numerous brain barriers, particularly the blood-brain barrier (BBB), which greatly impacts the ultimate drug therapeutic efficacy. Lately, nanocarrier technology has made huge progress in overcoming these barriers by improving drug solubility, ameliorating its retention, reducing its toxicity, and targeting the encapsulated agents to different brain tissues. The current review primarily offers an overview of the different components of BBB and the progress, strategies, and contemporary applications of the nanocarriers, specifically lipid-based nanocarriers (LBNs), in treating various brain disorders.

Graphical Abstract

Keywords:

• Brain
• barriers
• transcytosis
• nose to brain
• targeting effect
• challenges

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

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Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.