ABSTRACT
Artificially vesicular carriers, such as liposomes, have attracted great interest showing important success in the delivery of drugs, genes, vaccines, and other bioactive agents. In addition, these systems are ideal models for biological membranes, becoming useful tools in diagnostics, targeted cancer, and gene therapy. Archaeosomes are a new generation of liposomes, made from one or more polar ether lipids extracted from natural archaeal membrane lipids or synthetic archaeal lipids, exhibiting higher stability under different conditions, such as high temperatures, alkaline or acidic pH, presence of bile salts that would be encountered in the GI tract, and they are more resistant to oxidation and chemical hydrolysis than liposomes. Although archaeosomes are a recent technology, they have already proven to be a safe delivery system for bioactive compounds. The current challenge of drug delivery is liberation of drug agents at the right time in a safe and reproducible manner to a specific target site.
