Pharmaceuticals targeting: What are the different types of drug targeting?

Pharma Targeting is a bespoke research house with a backbone of world class pharmaceutical and marketing consultants and analysts. In a very general sense, one understands drug targeting as the ability of the drug to accumulate in the target organ or tissue selectively.

What is the drug targeting?

Drug targeting means to deliver the drug only to its site of action & not to the non-target organs, tissues or cells. The primary goal of this concept is to provide precise delivery of therapeutic agents into pathological area, while 384avoiding negative impact onto healthy tissues. The advantages to the targeted release system is the reduction in the frequency of the dosages taken by the patient, having a more uniform effect of the drug, reduction of drug side-effects, and reduced fluctuation in circulating drug levels.

What are the different types of drug targeting?

Different types of carriers can be used for drug targeting such as nanotubes and nanowires, nanoshells, quantum dots, nanopores, gold nanoparticles, dendrimers, noisome, ufasomes, virosomes, cubosomes, nanobots and transferosomes. The most common drug targets of currently marketed drugs include: proteins and nucleic acids.

Broadly there may be three drug targeting levels: first, second, and third, assigned to organs, cells, and organelles respectively. A fourth level is assigned to the molecular level of targeting. Although synthetic lethality is not a new idea, recent advances, including CRISPR-based gene editing, have made possible systematic screens for synthetic lethal drug targets in human cancers.