Drug delivery systems (DDS) are an important component of drug development and therapeutics. The field is quite extensive and requires an encyclopedia to describe all the technologies. The aim of this book is to put together descriptions of important selective technologies used in DDS. Important drugs, new technologies such as nanoparticles, as well as important therapeutic applications, are taken into consideration in this selection. This book will be an important source of information for pharmaceutical scientists and pharmacologists working in the academia as well as in the industry. It has useful information for pharmaceutical physicians and scientists in many disciplines involved in developing DDS such as chemical engineering, protein engineering, gene therap y, and so on. This will be an important reference for executives in charge of research and development at several hundred companies that are developing drug delivery technologies. Kewal K. Jain, MD v Contents Preface. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . v Contributors. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix 1 Drug Delivery Systems – An Overview. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Kewal K. Jain 2 The Role of the Adeno-Associated Virus Capsid in Gene Transfer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 Kim M. Van Vliet, Veronique Blouin, Nicole Brument, Mavis Agbandje-McKenna, and Richard O. Snyder 3 Delivering Small Interfering RNA for Novel Therapeutics . . . . . . . . . 93 Patrick Y. Lu and Martin C. Woodle 4 Catheters for Chronic Administration of Drugs into Brain Tissue. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109 Michael Guarnieri, Benjamin S. Carson, Sr. , and George I. Jallo 5 T ransdermal Drug Delivery Systems: Skin Perturbation Devices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119 Marc B. Brown, Matthew J. Traynor, Gary P. Martin, and Franklin K.