Biomaterials in Their Role in Creating New Approaches for the Delivery of Drugs, Proteins, Nucleic Acids, and Mammalian Cells in Safety Pharmacology

The use of biomaterials to enable and enhance life-saving therapies in medicine has its documented roots in the 1600s. Historically drugs were administered systemically for acute emergency situations. As injectable drug technologies developed, it was soon observed that drug administration would often be more effective if given in sustained release or tailored release profiles. However, the potential safety risks of drugs administered by these novel devices and biomaterials were also quickly realized. This chapter examines the documented evolution of the delivery of such compounds, the challenges encountered, and the solutions developed to address the need for safe delivery of drugs, proteins, nucleic acids and cells for human use. The advancement of biotechnology has accelerated the need for optimizing the safe and efficacious delivery with new biomaterials and excipients. Each biomaterial-based drug delivery system is unique to the drug, peptide, or protein employed in the system. Therefore, this chapter focuses on the safety considerations along with the therapeutic efficacy offered by this evolving developing area of therapeutics.