TARGETING OF NANOCARRIERS FOR CHEMOTHERAPY OF TUBERCULOSIS

Faulty prescriptions, low compliance of treatment due to the length of treatment and pill burden, inadequate bioavailability are the main factors for therapeutic failure and development of drug-resistant cases of tuberculosis (TB) especially multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) and extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB) where the treatment outcomes include more of the toxic effect of therapeutic agents and negligible cure rate, the mortality and spread of TB has further been aggravated because of synergy of this disease with HIV resulting in more lengthy treatment course, high dose requirement, and subsequent intolerable toxicity which poses a great threat to human health and defines an urgent need to develop novel anti-tubercular therapeutics that are safe, effective, are able to shorten the course of treatment, that have minimal interactions with antiretroviral drugs, minimal side effects of drug therapy. In this framework, nanoparticles hold tremendous potential to circumvent many of the above challenges, but disease site selectivity is again difficult to accomplish. Therefore, in order to increase the localization of nanocarriers containing anti-tuberculosis drugs (ATDs) to a target site, various ways of active targeting have been explored through the use of specific interactions at target site by modifying these nanocarriers with infectious cell specific ligands like sugars, lectins and aptamers. The main advantage of using such ligands is to achieve high disease site specific targeting in a convenient, simple and cost-effective manner