Prevention of HIV transmission by sexual route is one of the major challenges all over the globe. Approximately, 34 million people infected with HIV and among them more than 80% were infected by unprotected sexual intercourse (Vaginal/Anal). To overcome this problem, several prophylactic strategies such as sexual abstinence, use of physical barrier (condoms) have been employed. However, all of the strategies mentioned fail to control the prevalence of HIV due to lack of user compliance. Recently, microbicides were introduced as a new prophylactic strategy which provide both physical and chemical barriers against HIV. Several microbicides are in clinical pipeline and among them recently the Tenofovir microbicidal gel has successfully completed the Phase III trials. Our group is working on implementing the traditional system of medicine, by utilizing green technology for extraction of microbicides and ultimately formulating “nanomicrobicide” which not only provide a protective barrier against HIV transmission during intercourse but also improve user compliance due to their low cost and coital independency. 

Malaria

Malaria is one of the most debilitating parasitic infection in several tropical countries claiming one million lives annually. The complete onus of disease control lies on chemotherapy owing to the absence of an effective vaccine. Poor bioavailability and emergence of drug resistant parasite strains reduce the therapeutic potential of current antimalarials. The need of the day is to enhance the pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic profiles of current antimalarials through design of appropriate formulations. With this motto, our research group is actively involved in antimalarial drug formulation development. We have developed a myriad of drug delivery systems to enhance the antimalarial potential of various drugs such as artemether, lumefantrine, atovaquone, primaquine, halofantrine, arteether clotrimazole, curcumin, and clindamycin. These include Nanostructured lipid carriers (NLC), nanoemulsions, Self micro-emulsifying drug delivery systems (SMEDDS), suppositories, nanosuspensions, solid dispersions and polymeric hydrogel nanoparticles. Our group has developed NLC which show rapid selective uptake by the malaria infected red blood cells as opposed to the non-infected counterparts. The NLC technology initially developed for parenteral delivery of artemether has been evaluated successfully for intravenous delivery of anti-malarial combinations such as artemether-clindamycin and artemether-lumefantrine achieving a dose reduction of more than 80 % for both the combinations.