Liposome-Derived Nanosystems for the Treatment of Behavioral and Neurodegenerative Diseases: The Promise of Niosomes, Transfersomes, and Ethosomes for Increased Brain Drug Bioavailability

Abstract

Psychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders are amongst the most prevalent and debilitating diseases, but current treatments either have low success rates, greatly due to the low permeability of the blood–brain barrier, and/or are connected to severe side effects. Hence, new strategies are extremely important, and here is where liposome-derived nanosystems come in. Niosomes, transfersomes, and ethosomes are nanometric vesicular structures that allow drug encapsulation, protecting them from degradation, and increasing their solubility, permeability, brain targeting, and bioavailability. This review highlighted the great potential of these nanosystems for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, anxiety, and depression. Studies regarding the encapsulation of synthetic and natural-derived molecules in these systems, for intravenous, oral, transdermal, or intranasal administration, have led to an increased brain bioavailability when compared to conventional pharmaceutical forms. Moreover, the developed formulations proved to have neuroprotective, anti-inflammatory, and antioxidant effects, including brain neurotransmitter level restoration and brain oxidative status improvement, and improved locomotor activity or enhancement of recognition and working memories in animal models. Hence, albeit being relatively new technologies, niosomes, transfersomes, and ethosomes have already proven to increase the brain bioavailability of psychoactive drugs, leading to increased effectiveness and decreased side effects, showing promise as future therapeutics.

Novel Therapeutic Hybrid Systems Using Hydrogels and Nanotechnology: A Focus on Nanoemulgels for the Treatment of Skin Diseases

“…There are many types of organic nanocarriers, all having in common high biocompatibility with the human body, an essential criterion for drug delivery in order to minimize toxicity and side effects [87,88]. Liposomes, the first to be developed, and also the first to effectively reach the pharmaceutical market, are spherical nanocarriers with single (small or large unilamellar vesicles) or multiple (multilamellar vesicles) bilayered membranes, formed of natural or synthetic lipids, which enclose an aqueous core [89][90][91][92]. They have showed a number of advantages compared to conventional systems, including enhanced drug delivery, drug protection from degradation, improved bioavailability, and even prolonged half-life in the blood circulation when functionalized with specific polymers (such as polyethylene glycol (PEG)) on their surface (stealth or PEGylated liposomes) [82,93,94].…”

Niosomes: Composition, Formulation Techniques, and Recent Progress as Delivery Systems in Cancer Therapy

“…Thus, the niosomes types are: (i) small unilamellar vesicles (one bilayer, between 10 and 100 nm); (ii) large unilamellar vesicles (one bilayer, 100–3000 nm); and (iii) multilamellar vesicles (more than one bilayer, ≥10 μm) [ 12 , 13 , 36 , 39 ].…”

“…Niosomes, the most recently developed vesicular system with an extraordinary range of applications, are bilayer structures formed by amphiphilic non-ionic surfactants and lipidic components (mostly cholesterol) [12][13][14][15]. They are more stable than liposomes and and lipidic components (mostly cholesterol) [12][13][14][15]. They are more stable than liposomes and have the ability to encapsulate hydrophilic and lipophilic molecules with biological activity (Figure 1).…”

Quantum-level machine learning calculations to predict the PES of Selegiline

“…Investigating the interactions between all of these requires accurate outputs from fast calculations for molecular investigation and MD simulations, which we address in this work. Therefore, what is observed in the documents is that nanoparticles, nanomaterials, quantum rods, liposomes, chitosan, borneol and modi ed lactoferrin are common compounds that have been investigated in their interaction with Selegiline [91,92]. Also, several valuable works of molecular dynamics simulations, and ab initio and DFT calculations on Selegiline and its energetic interaction in various chemical environments have been reported in the literature [93][94][95][96].…”