General Approach to Drug Delivery Systems (DDS)

The field of drug discovery drives to find out efficient, selective, stable and biocompatible new drugs. The purpose of drug delivery systems (DDS) is to reduce the side effects that treatments usually cause to mitigate some diseases, especially cancer. Cancer treatments are usually so strong and invasive that they end up weakening the patient, so the cure became as dangerous as the disease. That is the reason that DDS try to maximize the effectiveness of the drugs administered by wanting them to reach specifically to the area affected by the disease (High specificity). In this regard, the fruitfully use of liposome-, erythrocytes-, nanoparticles- or antibodies-based therapies became a choice for the treatment of a huge range of diseases, due to the biocompatibility that these macromolecular systems present. In the last five years, a broad range of DDS have been developed, and some of them, specifically four ADC´s are approved by the FDA and commercializing. In this work, we summarized the most important approach to DDS obtained through chemical conjugation, highlighting ADC´s like the most promising controlled release systems.