Razi Journal of Medical Sciences

Transdermal drug delivery system is a non-invasive and an efficient method that provides sustained release and delivers therapeutics to target site. This system can improve the therapeutic efficacy and safety of the drugs, keep the plasma level of the drug constant, prevent the hepatic first pass metabolism and is convenient and pain-free self-administration for patients. Despite the many advantages of this system, the stratum corneum is the main obstacle to penetration through the skin.  A series of researches are taken in order to overcome stratum corneum to improve drug penetration. With the development of nanotechnology, using nanovesicles system such as ethosomes has been considered recently. Ethosomes are the ethanolic phospholipid nanocarriers which are mainly employed for transdermal drug delivery. These soft and flexible vesicles can transport drugs to the deep layers of the skin or systemic circulation. The presence of ethanol in ethosomes causes increase in the fluidity of cell membrane lipids and enhances skin permeation of ethosomes. Ethosomes have a lot of advantages including improvement of drug efficiency, decreasing the cytotoxicity of encapsulated drug in the nanovesicle, increasing patient compliance, reducing the cost of treatment and non toxicity of vesicle.
In this review, we have tried to describe all aspects of ethosomes including structure, and the main properties of ethosomes, advantages and disadvantages, methods of preparation, mechanism of permeation, and ethosomes function. Also its various features and roles in drug delivery, skin penetration performance of ethosomes are reviewed.