Drug Delivery and Other Pharmaceutical Applications

The unique properties make fluorinated surfactants attractive for drug delivery and drug release systems [168,173]. Fluorinated surfactants can be employed as covalently bonded drug carriers, as a form of prodrugs facilitating the incorporation of the drug into an appropriate delivery system, as dispersants, and in the form of fluorinated vesicles. 

Riess and co-workers [161,168] have synthesized a large number of fluoroalkylated amphiphiles. Their versatile modular design allowed a stepwise modification of the surfactant size and charge, as well as the hydrophilic, lipophilic, and fluorophilic character. The nature of the head, the number of tails (identical or different), the spacers, the connecting units, and the sites were altered in order to manipulate the physical and biological characteristics of emulsions, vesicles, and other colloidal systems. 

The permeability of the vesicle membrane can be reduced by incorporating an impermeable fluorinated sheet inside the lipidic film of the membrane [168,174]. The permeability can be fine-tuned by varying the length of the fluorinated segment in the surfactant, modifying the fluorocarbon-hydrocarbon ratio, and having fluorocarbon and hydrocarbon tails present in the surfactant molecule. 

Ristori et al [175-177] have studied mixed fluorocarbon-hydrocarbon surfactant vesicles of interest as drug carriers for biological and phannaceutical substances. Ammonium perfluoropolyether carboxylate and /7-dodecylbetaine, when mixed in an appropriate molecular ratio, form spontaneously stable vesicles. These mixed vesicles were investigated as carriers of model biomolecules [176] and metalloproteins [177]. 

The high solubility of respiratory gases allows the use of fluorocarbons for liquid ventilation and drug delivery by the pulmonary route [178]. For administration of drugs via the pulmonary route, reverse water in fluorocarbon emulsions 

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Prospects of using star polymers and dendrimers in drug delivery and other pharmaceutical application. [N. A. Peppas, T. Nagai, M. Miyajima, Pharm. Techn. Jpn. 1994, 10(6), 611-617] [ 1862]. 

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