Solid Lipid Nanoparticles as Drug Delivery System for Water-Insoluble Drugs

Solid lipid nanoparticles (SLNs) have emerged to combine the advantages of polymeric nanoparticles and lipid emulsions in early 1990s. SLNs can present several desirable properties derived from the solid state core. When formulating SLNs, there should be careful considerations about the physical state of the inner solid lipid core and its polymorphism and supercooling behavior. In this review, SLNs were compared to lipid emulsion and emulsion of supercooled melt to understand the unusual behaviors compared to lipid emulsions and to have insights into stability and release mechanism. SLNs have been regarded as biocompatible system because lipids are usually well-tolerable ingredients than polymers. Several studies showed good tolerability of SLNs in terms of cytotoxicity and hemolysis. Similar to various other nanoparticulate drug delivery systems, SLNs can also change biodistribution of the incorporated drugs in a way to enhance therapeutic effect. Most of all, large scale production of SLNs was extablished wihtout using organic solvents. Although there is no SLN product in the market till date, several advantagious properties of SLNs and the progress we have seen so far would make commercial product of SLNs possible before long and encourage research community to apply SLN-based formulations for water-insoluble drugs.