In recent years, attention has been focused on functional foods due to heightened health awareness. We are conducting drug delivery system research to ensure the safety of food ingredients and enhance their effectiveness from the viewpoint of “a healthy diet and medicine are equally impor tant for health”. It is known that β-carotene has useful physiological activities such as a strong antioxidant action and a source of vitamin A in the body. However, since it hardly dissolves in water, it has poor gastrointestinal absorbability and is difficult to use as an efficient functional food material. We have succeeded in greatly increasing the water-solubility of β-carotene and the absorption from the gastrointestinal tract by applying our unique amorphization technology. Our technology, which can be easily prepared without the use of organic solvents, is suitable for functional food development using poorly water-soluble compounds, and it therefore has high utility value.

The blood-brain barrier (BBB) is limited to deliver drugs to the brain after systemic administration. Intranasal route offers several advantages over the oral and parenteral route and has shown potential for targeting drugs to the brain for treatment of various central nervous system (CNS) disor ders. Drug delivery via the intranasal route bypasses the BBB and reaches different parts of the brain primarily via the olfactory and trigeminal neural pathways. Therefore, intranasal administration has at tracted as a non-invasive and simple administration route that can deliver a therapeutic agent for CNS disease directly to the brain. The delivery of nanosystems from the nose to the brain has shown poten tial for enhancing drug targeting to the brain and reducing systemic side effects. This article reviews and various transport mechanisms involved in drug absorption from intranasal, drug delivery from the nose to the brain, and the role of nanosystems in intranasal drug delivery including our recent findings.

Liposome is one of the fascinating drug delivery carrier. Several liposome formulations have been approved for clinical use. Most of the anticancer drugs, including the liposome formulations, need to be passed through the screening steps, which catch up the candidates with the highest antitumor effect, and then undergoing to the preclinical and clinical phases. However, the development process is slowed or even sometime prevented by the loss of understanding of pharmacokinetics of encapsulated drugs, the tumor immune modulation by liposome formulation, and the adverse reactions via induction of the specific antibodies to DDS carriers. In this article, we overview these issues we should pay further attention to develop liposomal formulation of anticancer drugs.