Soft drugs: design principles and topical applications.

Soft drugs are deliberately designed to undergo rapid metabolic inactivation, enhancing safety while maintaining efficacy, with notable success in topical applications.

• Why it matters: Improving drug safety is critical, especially for topical and systemic therapies, but the soft drug approach remains underutilized and often misunderstood, limiting its potential benefits.
• What they did: The review discusses the principles of soft drug design, clarifies its differences from prodrugs, and highlights recent clinical successes in dermatological, inhaled, and gut-restricted therapies, emphasizing practical applications.
• The result: This work advances understanding of soft drug strategies, encouraging broader adoption in drug discovery and improving therapeutic safety and efficacy across various medical fields.