Ionic Liquids: Novel Applications in Drug Delivery

The pharmaceutical industry is facing more and more challenges; so that there is need to bring some innovation in pharmaceutical sciences for the formulation of effective drugs and therapies. Many of the newly approved drugs have various problems in matching the desired requirements of solubility, bioavailability, stability, etc. A well established approach to overcome these limitations includes development of salts of targeted active compounds, but some old problems like polymorphic transformations of crystalline drugs are remaining, but the arrival of ‘third age of ionic liquids’ into pharmaceutical world may offer more design options. Active pharmaceutical ingredients can be readily converted into ionic liquids, generally called as ‘drug ionic liquid’. These are also called to be the ‘designer solvents’ as the design of liquid salt is carried out with some improved properties like viscosity, hydrophilicity, and many other chemical and physical properties; because of this tunable nature ionic liquids have many applications in drug delivery. These pharmaceutically active ionic liquids are thermodynamically stable and avoid polymorphic changes. Because of various fascinating properties these ionic liquids offers many options in drug delivery. These ‘drug ionic liquids’ offers many improved properties to the salt form of active pharmaceutical ingredients hence which are currently available in the market in different dosage forms which are from nanoparticles, micro emulsions, upto transdermal drug delivery system.