Various Challenges and Opportunities in Oral Delivery of Anticancer Drugs

Oncology is that area of medicine where patients are usually treated intravenously. Researchers are trying to find alternative drug delivery methods of anticancer drugs due to the pain associated with conventional drug delivery methods. Studies estimate that a majority of patients (up to 89%) prefer oral anticancer medications to traditional IV fluid or injection therapies when available. Better patient compliance, tolerability, reduced cost; greatest safety and possible increased efficacy are the main reasons for increased attention towards oral delivery of anti-cancer drugs. But oral bioavailability of this class is limited because of its idiosyncratic physicochemical properties and biological barriers such as pre-systemic metabolism and gastrointestinal instability. The various challenges to oral delivery of anticancer drugs are discussed extensively in this paper including peculiar physicochemical properties, biological barriers and adverse drug-drug interactions. Further, the emerging innovations in addressing the challenges to oral delivery of anticancer drugs are discussed. These mainly include absorption enhancers and nanocarriers based drug delivery systems.