Commercialisation of Innovations: A Case Study of Liposomal Formulations

Liposomes are the potential drug delivery systems for various therapeutic categories. During the past 60 years, researchers have explored this drug delivery system which has resulted in a large pool of documents in terms of patents and publications. The paper’s objective is to understand why after 60 years of extensive research with more than 50,000 patent documents and 35,000 research publications, only 17 products based on liposomes are commercially available. After detailed analysis, the authors found that the research publications and patent documents are primarily focused on the basic research aspects and have limited participation from the industry. Therefore, in this paper, it has been emphasised how the research projects on liposomes must re-orient its focus so that it leads to the commercialisation of liposomes. This paper also provides a comprehensive analysis of challenges and opportunities for researchers concerning various research areas of liposomes like manufacturing techniques, characterisations, stability, storage, pre-clinical and clinical evaluations, regulatory requirements as well as pharmaco-economic analysis.