Preface

In the healthcare field, providing optimal treatment to individual patients is of primary concern. Drug delivery systems can regulate drug release rate to get the desired profile, ensure high therapeutic effectiveness, and reduce side effects that are very interesting in pharmaceutical and biomedical applications. The localized drug delivery presents various factors designed to enable the delivery of therapeutic agents, such as drugs, genes, proteins, etc., directly to the site of disease in a controlled manner, sparing off-target cell/tissue toxicities. In this context, one of the considerable challenges in systemic drug delivery systems is to get the desired drug concentration at the specific organ, reduce side effects, and prevent drug inefficiency. The present book entitled "smart stimuli-responsive micro/nanocarriers for programmed and on-demand localized controlled drug release" is one of the first books on the market that focuses on localized drug delivery with enhanced drug release at the target site, reduced local toxicity, and better patient compliance in order to inspire readers to design and create novel drug delivery systems for the treatment of a wide range of diseases.

In this book, the present chapters provide a detailed introduction to polymers, nanostructures, and stimuli-responsive materials and their great potential for opening new avenues to address several challenges in conventional dosage forms in localized drug delivery systems. This book is ideally designed for researchers working in pharmaceuticals, bionanotechnologies, biomedical engineering, materials science, and related industries.