ABSTRACT
Infection of intracellular pathogens remains a serious challenge for clinical anti-infective treatment. The most commonly used strategy for the treatment of intracellular bacteria is long-term use of antimicrobials at high concentration,which not only brings se-rious side effects to patients,but also causes great economic pressure to the whole society. Thus,the development of new strategies to better kill intracellular bacteria by the antimicrobials which showed good bactericidal effect in in vitro experiments is extremely impor-tant. With appropriate carriers to embed or encapsulate drugs can better control drugs' pharmacokinetic behavior resulting in effective bioavailability increase of antimicrobials. The current studies on targeted drug delivery systems for anti-intracellular bacteria were re-viewed in the paper.