Abstract

Over the last two decades attempts have been made repeatedly and sometimes successfully to carry agents into the body through the intact skin by using lipid suspension. Use of composite lipidic agent carrier (liposomes, niosomes) was not successful to date due to the inability of such vesicles to pass through the narrow (<30 nm) intercellular passage in the outer skin layers. A solution to this problem is the use of orders of magnitude more deformable supramolecular aggregates, transfersomes. Such innovative drug carriers are driven across the skin by the naturally occurring transdermal gradients and promote transfer of various agents very efficiently and reproducibly. Transfersomes were successfully used animal and humans also for the transcutaneous and protein delivery. In this review we discuss the theoretical prospect, basic principle behind the development, mechanism of penetration and applications of transfersomes.