Recent advances in pulsatile oral drug delivery systems.

It is well established that several diseases exhibit circadian behavior, following the relevant rhythm of the physiological functions of the human body. Their study falls in the fields of chronobiology and chronotherapeutics, the latter being essentially the effort of timely matching the treatment with the disease expression, in order to maximize the therapeutic benefits and minimize side effects. Pulsatile drug delivery is one of the pillars of chronopharmaceutics, achieved through dosage form design that allows programmable release of active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) to follow the disease's time profile. Its major characteristic is the presence of lag phases, followed by drug release in a variety of rates, immediate, repeated or controlled. The scope of this review is to summarize the recent literature on pulsatile oral drug delivery systems and provide an overview of the ready to use solutions and early stage technologies, focusing on the awarded and pending patents in this technical field during the last few years.