Drug Targeting and Delivery

This series aims to provide comprehensive surveys of topics in drug delivery and targeting for senior undergraduates, graduates and those carrying out research in the many facets of the field. Drug delivery technologies and targeting strategies grow in scope and potential, as well as complexity, almost daily. New opportunities arise through the development of new materials for the design and fabrication of drug delivery vehicles and carriers; new challenges are posed by the discovery and development of new therapeutic agents, which include not only small organic and inorganic molecules but oligomers and macro molecules usually with no natural propensity for transport across biological barriers. The book series has, to date, covered delivery technologies in microencapsulation and liposomal delivery, the promotion of drug absorption, the important issues surrounding peptide and protein delivery, interfacial phenomena in drug delivery and targeting and biodegradable polymers of natural, synthetic or semi-synthetic origin. The technology of drug delivery can rarely be dealt with simply as a materials science topic, for systems have to be evaluated in the context of the biological environment in which they operate in vivo. It is the role of a book series to record and analyze that progress, and we hope that this series will achieve those aims and provide some stimulus for further discovery.