Potential Drug Delivery Pathways for Treatment of Alzheimer’s Disease

Abstract

Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) has been one of the most prevalent neurodegenerative disorders that majorly affect patients older than 65 years old. The treatment of the disease costs over 1% of the global GDP [1], yet not many new drugs have been developed which can effectively treat AD based on its pathological characteristics. The major challenge in treating brain disorders such as AD is the Blood-Brain Barrier (BBB) which refrains most of the drug molecules from entering the brain. Through reviewing multiple papers from PubMed Central®(PMC), which is an archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health’s National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM), three promising drug delivery pathways have been investigated regarding their capabilities and effectivenesses of transporting drug molecules into the brain, which are inorganic nanoparticles, multifunctional liposomes, and transdermal delivery system. In this paper, brief introductions regarding each delivery pathway were offered, and specific experiment that supported the delivery method was presented. The advantages, as well as drawbacks of each type of delivery pathway, were also discussed in this paper.