ABSTRACT

Introduction: Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is associated with damage to the retinal blood vessels that lead eventually to vision loss. The existing treatments of DR are invasive, expensive, and cumbersome. To overcome challenges associated with existing therapies, various intraocular sustained release and novel drug delivery systems (NDDS) have been explored.

Areas covered: The review discusses recently developed intraocular devices for sustained release of drugs as well as novel noninvasive drug delivery systems that have met a varying degree of success in local delivery of drugs to retinal circulation.

Expert opinion: The intraocular devices have got very good success in providing sustained release of drugs in patients. The development of NDDS and their application through the ocular route has certainly provided an edge to treat DR over existing therapies such as anti-VEGF administration but their success rate is quite low. Moreover, most of them have proved to be effective only in animal models. In addition, the extent of targeting the drug to the retina still remains variable and unpredictable. The toxicity aspect of the NDDS has generally been neglected. In order to have successful commercialization of nanotechnology-based innovations well-designed clinical research studies need to be conducted to evaluate their clinical superiority over that of the existing formulations.

摘要

简介：糖尿病视网膜病变 (DR) 与视网膜血管损伤有关，最终导致视力丧失。现有的 DR 治疗是侵入性的、昂贵的和繁琐的。为了克服与现有疗法相关的挑战，已经探索了各种眼内缓释和新型药物递送系统 (NDDS)。

涵盖的领域： 该评论讨论了最近开发的用于持续释放药物的眼内装置以及在将药物局部递送至视网膜循环方面取得不同程度成功的新型无创药物递送系统。

专家意见：眼内装置在为患者提供持续释放药物方面取得了很好的成功。NDDS 的发展及其通过眼部途径的应用无疑为治疗 DR 提供了优于现有疗法（例如抗 VEGF 给药）的优势，但其成功率非常低。此外，它们中的大多数已被证明仅在动物模型中有效。此外，将药物靶向视网膜的程度仍然可变且不可预测。NDDS 的毒性方面通常被忽视。为了使基于纳米技术的创新成功商业化，需要进行精心设计的临床研究，以评估它们相对于现有配方的临床优势。