Department of Pharmaceutical Technology, Faculty of Pharmacy, Panepistimiopolis Zografou 15771, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Athens, Greece.
Int J Pharm. 2013 Nov 18;456(2):340-52. doi: 10.1016/j.ijpharm.2013.08.087. Epub 2013 Sep 8.
Fractals have been very successful in quantifying nature's geometrical complexity, and have captured the imagination of scientific community. The development of fractal dimension and its applications have produced significant results across a wide variety of biomedical applications. This review deals with the application of fractals in pharmaceutical sciences and attempts to account the most important developments in the fields of pharmaceutical technology, especially of advanced Drug Delivery nano Systems and of biopharmaceutics and pharmacokinetics. Additionally, fractal kinetics, which has been applied to enzyme kinetics, drug metabolism and absorption, pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics are presented. This review also considers the potential benefits of using fractal analysis along with considerations of nonlinearity, scaling, and chaos as calibration tools to obtain information and more realistic description on different parts of pharmaceutical sciences. As a conclusion, the purpose of the present work is to highlight the presence of fractal geometry in almost all fields of pharmaceutical research.
分形在量化自然界的几何复杂性方面非常成功，引起了科学界的广泛关注。分形维数的发展及其应用在广泛的生物医学应用中取得了显著的成果。本文综述了分形在药物科学中的应用，并试图阐述药物技术领域的重要进展，特别是在先进药物传递纳米系统和生物药剂学与药代动力学方面的进展。此外，还介绍了分形动力学在酶动力学、药物代谢和吸收、药代动力学和药效动力学中的应用。本文还考虑了使用分形分析以及非线性、标度和混沌作为校准工具来获得药物科学不同领域的信息和更现实描述的潜在好处。总之，本工作的目的是强调分形几何在药物研究的几乎所有领域的存在。
