Application of erythrocytes as promising slow drug release or site-targeted delivery systems for a variety of bioactive agents from different fields of therapy has gained a remarkable degree of interest in recent years. The term biopharmaceutical is most commonly used to refer to all therapeutic, prophylactics, and in vivo diagnostic agents produced using live organisms or their functional components. At least in the US, biopharmaceuticals are often considered to include products manufactured using both ‘new’ technologies (recombinant DNA and monoclonal antibody/hybridoma) and ‘old’ technologies (fermentation, nonrecombinant cell culture derived proteins, vaccines, and other products from live organisms including blood/plasma products).Thus, a biopharmaceutical results from bio-processing and can, therefore, be defined as the intersection of pharmaceutical technology and biotechnology. This, in turn, has evoked plenty of research projects with the ultimate goal of using the potential capabilities of these carriers in different clinical situations. Biopharmaceuticals are among the most widely exploited candidates for being delivered to the host body using these cellular carriers. Biopharmaceuticals, therapeutically significant peptides and proteins, nucleic acid-based biologicals, antigens and vaccines, are among the recently focused pharmaceuticals for being delivered using carrier erythrocytes. Here there is, the potential applications of erythrocytes in drug delivery have been reviewed with a particular stress on the studies and laboratory experiences on successful erythrocyte loading and characterization of the different classes of biopharmaceuticals.
