Microcontainers for Intestinal Drug Delivery

Among all the drug administration routes, the oral one is the most preferred by the patients being less invasive, faster and easier.
Oral drug delivery systems designed to target the intestine are produced by powder technology and capsule formulations. Those systems including micro- and nano-particulate systems (i.e. vesicles, polymer nanoparticles, dendrimers etc.) suffer the non-unidirectional release of the drug to the epithelium of the intestine, which entails an inevitable loss in the lumen and, therefore, the reduction of the drug delivered to the intestinal epithelium. A new promising approach focuses on reservoir based microdevices serving as carriers for poorly soluble drugs, hereby called microcontainers (1).
Microcontainers have a cylindrical geometry and provide a unidirectional release due to their design meanwhile protecting the drug formulation from the low gastric pH and the enzymatic degradation. Here, we present the preparation of microcontainers with enteric coating (2) efficiently loaded with drug and able to target the intestine as a multi-particulate system.