Skin Electroporation for Transdermal and Topical Drug Delivery

Abstract

Transdennal delivery offers a number of potential advantages over conventional methods, such as the injectable and oral routes. This chapter provides an overall picture of the main features of skin electroporation used for transdennal and topical drug delivery. The biological composition and structure of the stratum corneum lipid bilayers make it particularly attractive for electroporation. Electroporation of skin can improve transdermal transport of drugs prototypical of transdennal application, e.g., fentanyl. Skin electroporation can increase transdermal transport by up to four orders of magnitude with lag times of only seconds to minutes in vitro showing that molecules rapidly respond to electric pulses. Most of the studies on transdermal drug delivery using skin electroporation have been performed in vitro using standard diffusion cells. Models involving transient creation of aqueous pathways across lipid bilayers have been used to explain the dramatic and often-reversible changes in membrane properties of cells and nonliving systems.