Innovative cerosomes as carriers for an enhanced dermatoses’ therapy

Dermatoses are skin diseases caused by lowered level of lipids in the intercellular lipid matrix of skin’s uppermost layer stratum corneum. A promising therapy is the application of liposomally formulated skin lipids (ceramides, cholesterol, fatty acids). These so called cerosomes proved very effective in disrupted skin barrier repair; however, they aim primarily on a mechanical surface restoration. For this reason an interesting idea is to combine the cerosomes and anti-inflammatory drugs (such as hydrocortisone) used for the treatment of pathophysiological processes in the skin. Unfortunately, liposomes generally show low drug encapsulation rates, hence they would not be very effective carriers. On the other hand, great encapsulation effectivity can be found in lipid nanocapsules (LNCs). We therefore aimed to create a combined system cerosomes-LNCs that would ensure the skin barrier restoration thanks to the ceramides and simultaneously effectively deliver hydrocortisone as a representative of anti-inflammatory drugs into lower layers of the skin. In this work, we characterized the formulations by dynamic light scattering and transmission electron microscopy to assess their size and morphology.