Exploring Salts, Co-crystals, Drug Nanoparticles, and Co-Delivery in Formulation Development of Ciprofloxacin: A Review

Based on Biopharmaceutics Classification System, Ciprofloxacin (CIP) is class IV active pharmaceutical ingredient which exhibits poor solubility and permeability in water. It showed limited solubility due to formation of strong crystal lattice, as positive charged piperazine group interacts with negatively charged carboxylate group to form chains of molecules. Due to better performance, it is used very frequently for many infections treatment. Though, it is very useful antibiotic, but it is photo-chemically unstable and development of antimicrobial resistance also reported in literature. Due to these serious concerns, the development of CIP formulation is a challenging task for pharmaceutical industries. Currently, several strategies are used to boost pharmaceutical properties of CIP such as solubility, dissolution and antibacterial activity. In this review we have discussed the approaches through which pharmaceutical properties of CIP can be improved such as solubility, dissolution rate and antibacterial activity and so forth. Salts, Co-crystals, salt-Co-crystals, metal complexes, and nanoparticles formations are some prominent strategies for altering CIP pharmaceutical properties. Preliminary, this review is design for CIP, but it can also be helpful for other antibiotics (especially fluoroquinolones class).