Carbon nanotube hybrid materials: efficient and pertinent platforms for antifungal drug delivery

Abstract

Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) have emerged as the brightest nascent artifact to deliver antifungal drugs in drug delivery applications, health care, and pharmaceutical industries. Excellent physio-chemical features such as huge surface area, tunable side wall, and microneedle-like morphology make CNTs suitable for drug carriers. Chemical attachments (covalent and non-covalent functionalization) result in the formation of functionalized CNTs (F-CNTs) and CNT-based hybrid materials (CNT-HMs). These F-CNTs and CNT-HMs have substantial antifungal activity and also have the potential to immobilize antifungal drugs such as amphotericin B, nystatin, curcumin, etc. on the exterior or interior surface, securely transport to the target sites, permeate through bio-barriers, and release these drugs in a controlled manner. As antifungal drug carriers, F-CNT and CNT-HMs exhibit more excellent antifungal activity than other conventional drug delivery systems and have the potency to invade biofilm to circumvent the multidrug resistance of fungal species. This review focuses on CNTs and CNT-HMs for antifungal drug delivery, including their functionalization methods, drug loading approaches, drug release mechanism, cellular internalization, delivery efficiency, and cellular toxicities with their workaround.