Solid Matrix Based Lipidic Nanoparticles in Oral Cancer Chemotherapy: Applications and Pharmacokinetics

Chemotherapeutic delivery by oral route in cancer patients has the potential to create “hospitalization free chemotherapy” which is a vision of oncologists, formulation scientists and patients. Such a therapeutic approach will improve patients’ compliance, ease the burden of the patients’ caregivers and significantly reduce the cost of treatment. In current clinical practice, chemotherapy carried out by intravenous injection or infusion leads to undesired side-effects such as plasma concentrations crossing the maximum safe concentration, rapid body clearance and lower bioavailability. Despite the presence of challenges such as poor aqueous solubility and stability of drugs and the presence of biological barriers like multidrug efflux transporter in the GI tract, oral cancer chemotherapy has the potential to surmount those obstacles. Lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) such as solid lipid nanoparticle, nanostructured lipid carriers, nano lipid–drug conjugates, mixed micelles, liposomes and nanoemulsions have shown some promising results for use in oral anticancer drug delivery through nanotechnological approach. LNPs demonstrate enhanced oral bioavailability owing to their ability to inhibit first pass metabolism via lymphatic absorption by chylomicron-linked and/or M-cell uptake. LNPs reduce the inter- and intrasubject pharmacokinetics variability of administrated drugs. Moreover, certain classes of phospholipids and surfactants used in the formulations of LNPs can suppress the P-glycoprotein efflux system. Here, we shall be discussing the biopharmaceutical challenges in oral cancer chemotherapy and how the LNPs may provide solutions to such challenges. The effect of GI tract environment on LNPs and pharmacokinetics shall also be discussed.