Is transdermal drug delivery research still important today?

When measured by the number of medicines consumed or prescriptions written, the topical and transdermal routes of drug delivery pale into insignificance compared with oral therapy. Industrial colleagues, therefore, occasionally adopt a somewhat utilitarian stance and question the value of academic research into skin treatment and drug permeation, with the rather parochial argument that it is of limited use to the UK pharmaceutical industry. To consider the validity of this somewhat dismissive approach, which in its extreme form essentially regards universities as servants of industry, we can consider the worldwide position with respect to commercial activity in dermatologicals and patches. We can then look at the intellectual challenges that make transdermal research so demanding (a prime role of universities is to seek out and tackle the difficult problems and, particularly, to pose such challenges to their PhD students). In skin research, it is essential that investigators apply fundamental physicochemical principles to an extremely variable and complex biological tissue. The work discussed here provides avenues for further research.