Tuberculosis (TB) is a disease caused by the pathogen Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Prolonged administration of high dose antibiotics using oral and injectable routes and their associated side effects show limitations to successful treatment outcome of TB. Nanocarrier-based dry powder inhalers (DPIs) may provide a breakthrough as an alternative therapeutic approach because of their stable, non-invasive nature and ability to target the drug at the site of infection. The current review focuses on the roadmap of the respiratory system, drug deposition and targeting at the site of infection via the pulmonary route. This review will provide readers with an overview of the existing literature of nanocarrier-based DPIs of anti-TB drugs. Among different nanocarriers, results of most of the proliposomes and polymeric particles-based DPIs with respect to their characterisation parameters like encapsulation efficiency, drug loading, storage stability and aerodynamic properties are not encouraging, whereas surface engineered, nanostructured lipid carriers (NLCs), i.e. ligand attached-NLCs-based dry powder inhalers (NLCs-DPI) show promising results. But still, there is a need to investigate them for in vitro, ex vivo, in vivo and toxicity studies to achieve a market approval.
Keywords: Pulmonary tuberculosis; drug targeting; lipid nanocarriers; nanocarrier-based DPIs; surface engineering.