Faculty of Pharmacy, Bahuddin Zakaryia University Multan, Pakistan http://pjpr.net 9 Introduction onventional dosage form provide a sharp increase in drug concentrations and drug concentration falls below the therapeutic range after a short interval of time until the re- administration of drug. So there is need of such dosage forms which provide not only the sustained delivery of drug but also reduce the fluctuations in the plasma drug levels and frequency of administration (Freiberg and Zhu, 2004). Recently a lot of work has been done to develop and formulate oral control release multiple unit dosage forms using natural and synthetic polymers, which are becoming more popular than the conventional single unit dosage forms due to its inherent advantages of providing uniform drug delivery; avoiding the vagaries of gastric emptying and different transit rates throughout the gastro-intestinal tract. This fact coupled with their ability to prolong the release of drug has increased the interest in developing the controlled drug delivery (Banerjee et al., 2012). One of the methods to achieve controlled drug delivery is developing the microspheres. These systems act as a reservoir of therapeutic agents, with spatial and temporal release of drugs for the desired therapeutic outcomes. The microspheres should have ability to incorporate drugs without loss of activity, tunable release kinetics, sufficient in vivo stability, biocompatibility, lack of toxicity, biodegradability and ability to target specific organs or tissue (Isıklan et al., 2011). Desired drug release rates by using microspheres can be achieved by rate controlling membrane or by the matrix of polymer containing the suspended drug. C Hafiz Shoaib Sarwar* 1 , Muhammad Hanif 1 , Aamir Jalil 2 , Malik Salman Haider 2 , Fahad Naeem 1 , Ahmad Nawaz 1 Vesh Churasiya 1 Microspheres for the Drug Delivery Applications Review Article Abstract Conventional dosage forms provide a sharp increase in plasma drug levels that falls below the therapeutic range after short interval of time until the re-administration of drug. There is a need of such dosage forms which provide not only sustained drug delivery but also reduce the plasma drug levels fluctuations. Microspheres used in drug delivery systems due to their ability to sustain the drug release, their biodegradability and compatibility and targeted drug delivery. In this review different types of microspheres their methods for the preparation with different hydrophilic and hydrophobic polymers, drug loading capacities will be discussed. Different characterizations like SEM, FTIR, XRD, DSC, rheological properties and invitro drug release are successfully described. Received: 02 Nov 2014 Revised: 26 Dec 2014 Accepted : 28 Dec 2014 Online: 30 Dec 2014 1 Department of Pharmacy, Bahuddin Zakaryia University, Multan, 2 Department of pharmacy, Comsats Intitute of Information and Technology, Abbotabad, Pakistan. Keywords: Biodegradable, Dosage forms, Microspheres, SEM, FTIR, XRD *Corresponding Author : Hafiz Shoaib Sarwar, Faculty of Pharmacy, Bahuddin Zakaryia University, Multan, Pakistan e-mail: : h_shoaibsarwar@hotmail.com , Ph: +92 3347891415