The Need For Accessible Drug Delivery For Anti-infective Therapies

Infectious diseases cause widespread havoc in the world every year. They have been treated for a long time with specific anti-pathogenic medications like antibiotics, antivirals, antifungals, and others. However, it has been observed over the past few years that even they are losing their effectiveness in some cases, which is why there is a need to find something that is more potent, offers fewer adverse effects, and can be easily administered for a wide range of infection-causing microorganisms.

This calls for anti-infective agents that have recently attracted a lot of attention from those working in the drug development field. Anti-infective therapies are more generalized but equally effective. This means they can target a broader range of infection-causing organisms at once without hampering the body's physiology.

What Are Anti-Infective Therapies?

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Anti-infective therapies are medications that prevent infections caused by any microorganism. Unlike antibacterial or antiviral medicines that work against only a specific kind of microorganism, anti-infective medications work on any microorganism—be it bacteria, fungus, virus, protozoa, or worm—that may cause an infection in the human body.The anti-infective medication is mostly a mildly acidic solution that does not harm the human body. Still, it interferes with the proteins and fats of the pathogenic microorganism, changes its properties, and kills it.

Why should anti-infective therapy be medically accessible?

In most cases, when there is an infection in a patient, the doctor prescribes the required antibiotic or antiviral medication per the patient's symptoms and diagnosis. However, antibiotics, or any target-specific anti-pathogen medication, have several drawbacks now being brought to light. Here are some of the drawbacks of the conventional ways of treating infections and infectious diseases:

1. Many times, the prescribed antibiotics serve the purpose of only fulfilling the patient's expectations by alleviating the symptoms and not focusing on treating the bacterial infection thoroughly.
2. It has also been observed that a single antibiotic is not potent enough to meet all the needs of infectious diseases. Even if a broad-spectrum antibiotic is chosen for the treatment, it does not ensure that bacteria of every kind will be dealt with
3. The repeated use of antibiotics and antiviral medications only hastens the process of natural selection. It, therefore, propagates the stronger and more resistant strains of bacteria and viruses to grow and survive. This makes the pathogens stronger every day.
4. The conventional methods of dealing with infections might suppress the symptoms and partially eliminate the organisms causing infections. This increases the chance of the infection coming back again.

Consequently, anti-infective therapy is now considered a more appropriate option to fight infectious organisms. This is because anti-infective therapy is dynamic and very potent. There is only a need to understand the essential microbiology of the organism, and the treatment does not require extensive detail about the infectious organism. If anti-infective therapy is medically accessible, all these challenges will be overcome, and the world might find a new way to deal with infections.

Accessible delivery methods for anti-infective therapies

There have been several different ways of delivering anti-infective drugs, but the most convenient and accessible method has been using nanomedicine for the delivery of anti-infectives. Nanomedicine provides an opportunity to improve the efficiency of the anti-infective regimen. The nanosystems are a level above the conventional formulations owing to their increased solubility, stability, improved epithelium permeability, and bioavailability.

They also prolong the half-life of the anti-infective medication, which results in their being effective in the human body for a long time and protecting the target tissue for longer durations—all while minimizing any side effects.The nanocarriers have a very sophisticated physicochemistry that allows both passive and active targeting of the infectious site. Passive targeting is a process by which the structure and physicochemistry of the nanoparticle are modulated.

This becomes an efficient option for efficient drug delivery to the bacteria. On the other hand, active targeting uses techniques like magnetic hyperthermia induced by iron oxide nanoparticles. This is also very efficient in targeting the drugs to the infected site. The nanoparticles are also intelligently designed to respond to changes in pH or enzymes. This makes them release the anti-infective medications as soon as they detect a change in the ambient pH or enzyme concentration to nip the infections before they can spread.

Conclusion

‍Dealing with infectious diseases has always been a challenge. With the number of implantations and other such invasive techniques of treatment increasing in medicine, the chances of infections, even after the precautions, have grown manifold.

In such a situation, something like anti-infective therapy that focuses on an entire umbrella of different kinds of infection-causing organisms and effectively eliminates them rather than just suppressing them. It can be revolutionary if it is made accessible for drug delivery.

About ZIM Laboratories:

ZIM Labs is an innovative drug delivery solution provider focusing on improving patient convenience and adherence to drug intake. We offer a range of technology-based drug delivery solutions and non-infringing proprietary manufacturing processes to produce and supply innovative and differentiated generic pharmaceutical products to our customers globally. At ZIM Labs, we provide our customers with a comprehensive range of solid value-added dosage differentiated generic products in semi-finished and finished categories/formulations. These include granules, pellets (sustained, modified, extended-release), taste-masked powders, suspensions, tablets, capsules, and recently developed Oral Thin Films (OTF).

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