Polysaccharide Coated Nanostructured Lipid Carriers: A Novel Approach of Drug Delivery System

Nanostructured Lipid Carriers (NLC) are newly developed drug delivery systems, which have shown a lot of advantages over conventional solid lipid nanoparticles, such as improved drug incorporation and release properties. NLCs are lipids based formulations which have low toxicity. For improvement in biopharmaceutical properties, NLCs are coated with polysaccharides to combine the advantages of lipidic nanoparticles with the biological properties of polysaccharides. Many methods are used for the formulation of polysaccharides coated NLCs such as high pressure homogenization, microemulsion technique, emulsification-solvent diffusion, emulsification-solvent evaporation, solvent injection or solvent displacement, multiple emulsion technique, phase inversion, ultrasonication and membrane contractor technique. Important application areas of nanostructured lipid carriers in pharmaceutics are topical drug delivery, oral and parenteral administration and have found huge applications in cosmetics, food and agricultural products.